It can be easy to get swept into the day to day of farm life and forget to celebrate the big and little moments that happen along the way.
Celebration is something that 2025 Top Producer Women in Agriculture Award winner, Kimberly Ratcliff, tells other generational farmers is key to getting the next generation to come back to the farm. “I think if we can use that celebration of how you guys have built this community, then we can get… everyone to come back home,” she says.
Ratcliff says that she came back to the family farm with the intention of saving her parents from some of the stress of day-to-day chores, but through celebrating the community that had been built by previous generations, her calling changed to saving the community. “I think if you can get a community behind your mission, then it’s not as hard as you think it is,” Ratcliff says in this interview with RealAgriculture’s Shaun Haney, recorded at the Top Producer Summit in Kansas City, Missouri.
Ratcliff is a second generation rancher who operates what she calls a turnkey farm in east Texas. The farm produces cattle and takes that through to the meat side of the business, keeping much of the value chain within her community.
The goal for Ratcliff is to share the story of what has happened in her community with others, using the same model to help the economies of other small towns. “We used to have everything in one community… there is a place for these models across the nation. So how can we create them?”
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