Annie’s Project is a premier resource for farm women.  I was introduced to Annie’s Project through the 2007 Women in Agriculture series presented by dedicated MSUES professionals Sonia Hancock and Beverly Howell.  That WIA program highlighted the need and planted the seed for our current Mississippi Women for Agriculture program. 

 

But how did Annie’s Project come to be?    It was created by Ruth Hambleton during her years as a Farm Business Management and Marketing Educator at the University of Illinois Extension Service. Her program, launched in 2003, was inspired by her mother, Annette Kohlhagen Fleck (1922–1997). 

 

When Annie Fleck married a farmer in 1947, she faced many challenges. Three generations living under one roof is challenge enough. Finding information pre-Google was a challenge we can hardly imagine today, with a world of resources at our fingertips. Annie was bright, innovative, and ready to dive in to make the family farm more profitable. Perhaps the most significant challenge facing the young wife was a mindset in that era that denied women a role—or even a voice—in agriculture.

 

But Annie persevered, and through her exceptional record-keeping, she was able to show which enterprises were making a profit or a loss on the farm. She even took over the dairy and egg projects so her husband could take an off-farm job. She was constantly reading, always ready to try new techniques and ventures. She proved that her voice and ideas were valuable. She did all this while raising four children… and probably dancing in heels… BACKWARDS. Eventually, her research, resilience, and resolve paid off, and her fifty-year tenure brought her wealth and success. But Annie’s influence did not end there.

 

One of those four children, daughter Ruth, watched the hard work and struggles of her mother. Ruth pursued a career with the University of Illinois Extension Service. When Ruth had the opportunity to create a program, she wanted to address the needs of farm women. She designed Annie’s Project to provide information, connections, and tools that would empower women like Annie. Twenty-two years later, Ruth’s dream program has done just that for many thousands of women. Careful evaluations have shown that two innate components that women share have been responsible for the phenomenal growth and success: connection and communication.

 

The original format of the program was a series of six weekly classes at a central location. Through Mississippi Women for Agriculture, we organized a successful Annie’s Project workshop in Brookhaven a few years back, and there have been other locations in Mississippi that followed suit. The confidence and support gained from in-person meetings are so valuable and not to be discounted; but with advanced technology, opportunities to access information abound. The lack of classes in your area does not have to prevent you from learning about risk management.

 

Primarily, Annie’s Project addresses five key areas of risk management:

As the program has grown, additional important topics such as record-keeping, farm succession, self-care, and rural resiliency have been included.

Farming is inherently “risky business,” but there are ways to mitigate and navigate risk. In our Annie’s Project series, we are going to explore risk management and share helpful resources.