At the time, Dana Elliot was just another teenager growing up on a family farm. She didn’t have a plan or any big dreams. Taking over the family farm, located near Sacred Heart, Minnesota, just wasn’t on her mind.
As it turns out, life had other plans for her when her father needed help driving the grain cart during harvest and tapped her to take on the task.
Perhaps she was influenced by the adrenaline rush that comes with every harvest. But a seed was planted in her mind and an idea sprouted.
She liked this, she realized. She wanted to be a farmer.
When she eventually told her dad, Dan Elliot, it was a shock at first. Her two older sisters, after all, had followed in their mother’s footsteps and pursued nursing careers. In fact, the three now work at the same hospital in Olivia.
During their childhoods, Dan Elliot kept the three girls involved with chores, including maintaining and harvesting the grapes he sold to a nearby winery for a decade. Along with that, they picked rocks, washed equipment, walked beans and mowed the lawn.
“Dad was always crabby with us because we were in tank tops and flip-flops,” she remembers with a small laugh, recalling their poor choice in ag attire when he sent them out to pick rocks.
Once she had her heart set on farming, she found a college that could help her get a strong foundation in becoming an ag producer. She not only found a familiar face at Ridgewater College in Willmar, where her uncle teaches the mechanics course, she was pleased with its ag-focused curriculum. The ag instructors, for example, own their own land and farm. It was intensive, she says, keeping the students in class from 8-3 each day, while offering breaks each semester for harvesting and planting.
"They give us a lot of real-life stuff," she said. "They have a really great ag program."
Now she’s married — she goes by Dana Engstrom — and lives with her husband, Ian, in their home in Renville. When he goes to work at his job as an electrician, she spends her mornings at her part-time office job in town. When noon rolls around, she works with her dad and their longtime employee, Rick, on the Elliot family farm.
This marks the beginning of transitioning the farm from father to daughter, and right now, it still feels very much in the early stages for her.
At this point, she’s gained the ability to perform all the farming operations. Well, just about. This spring found her learning how to spray. She's also renting and cultivating 160 acres on her own this growing season.
"It's fun to say this is my field now," she says. She scouts, plants, combines, pays the insurance and the rent. Dad, with his deep experience with the land, clues her in on problem areas in the field and helps her market the crops.
She’s learned a lot, she says.
“But I haven’t learned nearly enough to run the operation all on my own.”
She’s still learning from the School of Dad. He keeps her involved with every aspect of the operation and decision making, taking time to explain what he does and why. Together, they discuss the pros and cons of one day reducing tillage and planting cover crops.
“My dad likes to research and make sure that the changes he makes won’t set us back financially or hurt our yields,” she says.
Right now, he still makes the executive decisions, even when she’s working the acres of land she rents from him.
But there's no mistaking that he's tremendously proud of his daughter. When she’s doing work on the farm, whether it's driving the semi or getting the planter ready for the field, she says he’ll stop and take videos and photos, and send them to family members.
In some ways, her choice to farm makes her stick out in a crowd, partly because of her youth and partly because she’s a woman in a field that still skews male. When it comes up in conversation, voices rise in pitch, and eyebrows arch upwards in a manner that has become very familiar to her. “Oh, that’s great!” they exclaim.
Even though men are still in the majority of producers, Engstrom represents how agriculture is undergoing a shift. Just over one-in-three farmers are women (36%), according to the 2019 Census in Agriculture issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but that still represents a 27% rise since 2012. What's more, 56% of farms have at least one female as a producer, and 38% of operations have a female primary producer.
However, there is one time when Engstrom gets to experience a rare shift in dynamics. When the two are in a training session to use new ag software, the representative will interact more with her than her dad. He’s not tech phobic, per se, she explains. “But they know I’m going to pick that up more quickly and teach it to my dad.”
Without a doubt, Engstrom respects her father’s knowledge and experience, especially his marketing skills.
“My dad is very smart with money management,” she says.
Meanwhile, she’s plugging away. In farming, there’s a lifetime of learning. There’s the hope that everything — the classes, seminars, on-the-farm experiences, the books and articles she reads, the long talks with her dad and other mentors — will one day add up to something big. With grit and persistence, and, most of all, wisdom gained taking those tough knocks from challenging growing seasons and markets, she'll get to where she wants to be.
That is a savvy, seasoned farmer, ready to take over and keep the family farm going strong.
And one day, she'll call herself a primary producer. Just like Dad.
For more information on the #WomenInAg series, please see our related blog posts:
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