When longtime Strauss Feeds customers, Sherry Arnold and Minnie Ward, started their farming careers more than four decades ago, there weren’t many women choosing production agriculture as their career paths. “I actually went to college for early childhood education, but the longing for agriculture pulled me back to the farm pretty quickly,” recalled Ward. “I guess you could say it was in my blood.”

Ward’s career has taken her through a circuitous path of agricultural roles: as a family dairy farmer; pig nursery manager; large-dairy herdsperson; and calf and heifer specialist for a nutrition company. Today, she still wears many hats, working as a sales rep for calf equipment company Calf Star; serving on a facilitation team for the Minnesota Dairy Initiative; and contract raising about 300 calves (120 on milk) with her husband, Randy, and their two teenage daughters at their St. Charles, Minn. farm.

Like Ward, Sherry Arnold packed up her non-agriculture college diploma and headed back to her family’s dairy farm. “I majored in finance, which didn’t seem to make much sense at the time, but it actually has served me pretty well as a farmer,” laughed Arnold.

Arnold milked cows alongside her parents, Norm and Judy Busse, until they sold the lactating herd in 1999. It didn’t take long, however, for cattle to repopulate Busse’s Barron Acres near Barron, Wis.

“We had a neighbor who was expanding his dairy, and he said, ‘I hear you like raising calves. We hate it. Do you want to raise ours?’” she recalled.

Busse’s Barron Acres began purchasing bull calves and contract-raising heifer calves for that dairy, with Arnold in charge. “Back then, everything was hard,” she remembered. “It started out as sort of a grand experiment. Nobody knew how to charge for contract rearing, and I was still learning about raising calves. I failed a lot. Calves have a way of keeping you humble.”

Little did Arnold know that she was blazing a trail not only for women in agriculture, but for a whole new segment of the dairy industry. Today, she is recognized as one of the country’s earliest pioneers of contract heifer raising, and her operation consists of more than 6,000 calves (2,200 on milk) from 13 dairies, cared for by 32 employees.

Both women also raised families as they simultaneously expanded their careers. Ward has four children and Arnold has three, all of whom grew up working alongside their mothers. “When my oldest two were babies, they went right out to the barn with me,” shared Ward. “We had a swing over the pipeline and they rode around in the feed cart.”

Arnold said her husband, Jeff, who is a retired Wisconsin state trooper, worked nights and she worked days when her kids were young. “I also had my parents right here on the farm to help me,” she noted. “Those were crazy years, but somehow, we got through them. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

While none of Arnold’s children desired to return to the farm, they all have fond memories and appreciation for the way they grew up. “My son went into the service,” she explained. “He realized how much he valued the discipline, organization skills, and work ethic he learned working on the farm. He quickly found out that not everyone grows up that way.”

Ward’s oldest daughter is now a young mom herself, juggling a teaching job, two young children, and running a family dairy farm with her husband. “I look at her and marvel at how she gets it all done,” said Ward. “The other day she sent me a picture of my 2-year-old granddaughter. She was dipping the navel on a newborn calf. That’s her job. Gosh, that made me a proud grandma!”

As calf raisers, both Ward and Arnold believe women are well-equipped for the job. “It’s built into us,” stated Ward. “We have the nurturing instincts and patience to take care of those little creatures. Most of us are not big enough to rough house calves, and that’s not what they need, anyway. Women successfully raise calves with finesse, not physical strength.”

“All of my milk feeders are women,” added Arnold. “They take their work very personally. We have a saying on our team: ‘Big or small, we raise them all.’”

In the early years of her career, Arnold said there were times when she wasn’t viewed seriously as a farmer or authority figure. “Once when I was just a few years out of school, my parents went away for the weekend. I was milking with our hired man, and he kicked our dog. I fired him on the spot,” she declared. “He was indignant, thinking a ‘girl’ like me had no right to fire a man like him. Luckily, my dad backed me up.”

She said she has been asked, “can I talk to your husband?” more than once by a sales rep visiting the farm. “I always thought that was pretty funny,” she related. “I’d say, ‘well, you can talk to him, but he’s a state trooper, so if you do, it might be because you’re in trouble.’” Now she has a male business partner, Micah Halvorson, who is about 20 years her junior. “Occasionally it’s fun to watch new reps when they show up and try to figure out who’s in charge,” Arnold grinned. “I don’t think this sort of arrangement would have flown 20 years ago, but now it works, and I am treated almost completely with respect in this business. It is humbling when others in the industry call and ask me for my advice.”

Ward, who also is an adjunct agriculture instructor at a local community college, said she always counsels young female students to truly seek out and follow their passions. “It took me a while to figure out that calves were my true calling,” she explained. “Once I did, I haven’t ‘worked’ a day since, because I really love what I do.” She said some might call women in her generation glass-ceiling breakers or heroes. “But I think the real heroes are our mothers and grandmothers, who were out working just as hard, but never got the credit or autonomy that we did,” she stated.

“Now, it really makes no difference whether you’re a man or a woman in this industry,” said Ward. “We are not just ‘women in agriculture.’ We ARE agriculture!”

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