Eight years ago, Kacie Luckett stood in the backyard of her two-acre Central home with an abundance of fruits and vegetables she had grown to feed her family of four.
“We had a lot of stuff but no outlet. I was a physical therapy assistant at the time, doing home health, and I was giving our produce away—and we still had more,” Luckett, 32, tells Business Report in a new feature from the current issue.
She began selling her produce at the farmer’s market in Zachary and eventually to the Red Stick Farmers Market. As business grew, she and her husband moved their backyard farm to a 30-acre plot of land in Pride that used to be a cow pasture.
And Luckett, who went to school for physical therapy, became a farm owner.
“If you would have told me I would own a farm,” she says. “I would have said you were crazy.”
Farming, however, is in Luckett’s blood. Growing up in Central she helped her dad pick the butter beans and snap beans he planted in a football field-length farmland.
Luckett is part of a growing trend in America: female farm owners.
Nationally, 14% of the nation’s 2.1 million farms had a woman listed as the primary operator, according to the 2012 Census of Agriculture from the United States Department of Agriculture, the most recent data available. Women farmers control 7% of U.S. farmland and account for 3% of the sales, the report says.
Of the roughly 26,000 farms in Louisiana, about 3,500—or 13.5%—of them are operated by women, according to USDA statistics. But experts say that number could be even larger.
“This number represents women who are the sole operator of farms, but if you looked at women who are running a farm with a partner, it’s higher,” says Kevin Norton, state conservationist for Natural Resources Conservation Service for the USDA in Alexandria. “We are seeing women entering a lot of different roles in agriculture—in the business end, on the farm and in the political realm. They are in every area and every aspect of farming.”
As for Luckett, there is no typical day. She works on the farm with her husband, Derek, and six men from Mexico who spend 10 months of the year working for her on H-2A temporary agricultural visas.
“I don’t think people take women farmers serious all of the time,” she says. “This is a very male dominated field—and older males. Most farmers are over the age of 50. So, to walk down the road at the Red Stick Market and have people look at me and think the guys who are with me are in charge and then realize that they’re not, that is a shock sometimes.”
Read the full feature. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
