Grower Spotlight: Tiffany Hodges

Well, Aubrey and I have been married almost 10 years, and when we got together, I had no farm experience, and as always tell people, his dad had six houses when we got married, and his dad had foot surgery and had some pretty high losses, and you know, before these great products like Big Old Bird and things of that nature, so I got to pick up several hundreds, close to a thousand chickens, the first time I was ever in the chicken house, so you know, shortly after that, we got engaged because I stuck around through all the chickens, and then we got married, and I've just always helped on the farm in different aspects of it, from chicken houses to row crop, and we had two boys in 21 months, and so I stayed at home and was able to help on the farm as well, which has always been, you know, an interesting dynamic, you know, being a farmer/farm wife/mom, so you know, a lot of different roles to feel, depending on the day. Well, I feel like, you know, as a woman in agriculture in general, you deal with a lot of, you know, sometimes sexism, discrimination, you know, that you don't always know as much as your male counterpart, and you know, the best advice I can give women that deal with that is just to kind of, you know, stand strong in what you believe in, and, you know, just deal with people that will treat you with respect, and, you know, you just have to kind of learn to balance it in a male- dominated role primarily, and, you know, show them that you know what you're doing, and then you can earn their respect as much as you hate to say that you have to do that sometimes, and, you know, different roles, but, you know, I feel like I deal with it kind of on both fronts as a farmer and a business woman running my wedding venue as well, so. But glad I got a good one that knows I'm an equal. A lot of my friends ask me how, after 10 years of marriage, we still like each other so much, even though we work together, and, you know, essentially there's times we're together more time than not, but, you know, I feel like, with anything, you truly have to enjoy what you do, and, you know, we love working on the farm, and raising our boys here, and they love the farm life, and, you know, every aspect from row crop to chicken houses to, you know, running around in muddy puddles, but, you know, you just have to make it work, and work together as a unit, and sometimes you have to give each other a little extra grace, you know, and, I always say my husband here has baptized me by fire on the farm, because I was raising the city, no farm experience, and, you know, he's always had a lot of faith in me, sometimes maybe a little too much, and what I'm capable of doing, so I've always gotten very short lessons, and he says here have at it, so, we've made it this far, and still pretty happily married, so, you know. The only thing that I've not ran as of yet, and that's where I've drawn the line, is the international. I will not haul grain, but I will pick, run grain cart, you know , pick up chickens, bush-hogs, cornstogs, you know, I run a zero-turn lawn mower, I mean, so, you know, really all kinds of different equipment, and, you know, things of that nature, so, pretty much a little bit of everything, and I'm the smallest one, so I'm the one that always has to help work on things, because I've literally had to lay up on corn heads, and dig out ant beds, and all kinds of things to the years, so. Put your rod in there and let you fix it. Yep.