Dear Corporate Ag, Don't Try to Empower My Womanhood
By Jennifer Hill
Pioneer Seeds recently ran an ad that is receiving viral like status on Facebook. The ad features the face of a woman in plaid alongside the words “Her Great Grandmother married a farmer. Her Grandmother married a farmer. Her mother married a farmer. Her husband married a farmer”. The company is clearly attempting to win customers and accolades by publicly virtue signaling that they support women in agriculture, and this woman in ag is over it.
I spent a long time trying to figure out why this ad, and other women’s themed agriculture promotions, bother me so much, and there’s a few components to my discomfort. First there’s an implied victimhood. By declaring that women in agriculture need empowered and need corporate America to help us do it we are implying that we have been victims of our femininity in the past. I am not denying that my reproductive parts have ever gotten in the way of my business. I’ve had store clerks question my large orders of things like DectoMax and salt blocks, suggesting I call my husband to confirm I was getting the right thing. I’ve had hunters refuse to discuss pricing with me, preferring to only speak to the man. Heck the vast majority of our self-guided hunters stop me on the road, yards before I can even reach their campsite for any conversation and the implication has always been clear, they aren’t interested in having me in camp. Meanwhile my husband is invited for dinner and drinks. While this could just be a reflection on my shining personality, I definitely walk away with the impression that it’s more about a woman in camp. But does that make me a victim in need of rescuing by a societal shift? No. I roll my eyes and continue on with life. I don’t dwell on the ways I am offended, nor do I think that if only Mossy Oak would run a female power ad maybe my hunters would take me more seriously.
Another reason the ad makes me squeamish is it’s divisive nature. It reads like only the husband or the wife can be the farmer, which is of course entirely untrue. My husband is a rancher and so I am. We can both wear the pants on the ranch and make sure the varied work gets done. So why try to pit us against each other?
I, like much of rural America, am tired of public corporate virtue signaling. Black and brown power (and maybe Asian too, depending on if we’ve decided they are white or not this month), LGBTQ colors everywhere in June, pictures of women working at Boeing (because somehow the bombs they drop must hurt less if they’re engineered by a vagina?). These attempts by corporate America to jump on to every victimhood and oppressed celebration get tough to stomach and I’m disappointed to see it filtering into the agricultural community.
When I spoke out about my distaste for the Pioneer Seeds ad a popular male “ag-vocate” informed me that I must not understand what it’s like to be a woman in ag. The irony of his “mansplaining” the issue of women in ag to me seemed lost on him. Are inaccurate assumptions sometimes made about me and my role on the ranch? Sure. But people assume things about my husband too. Urbanites assume he’s a dumb redneck and other ranchers assume that generational ranching is equivalent to being born with a silver spoon. Those are both inaccurate. But you know what? He’s not going to demand John Deere run an ad empowering him.
I suggest that agriculture companies stick to advertising their products based on their merits, just as I will prefer to allow my own ranch work stand on its merits rather than my status as a women in ag. Rather than screaming, “I am woman, hear me roar” I’d prefer to yell, “I am a rancher, watch me kick ass.”