Women finding CommonGround in fields

Editor's Note: The following is a Lee County Farm Bureau sponsored article and part of a series of stories Pen City Current will be doing taking a deeper look at agricultural issues in Lee County.

LEE COUNTY -  In 2024, women made 84 cents for every dollar men made. The needle has moved remarkably slowly in equalizing the status of women in the workplace.
However, that gender gap in farming is shrinking quickly with women taking on roles traditionally held by men.
A group of farming women across the state have formed a group called CommonGround Iowa, and Donnellson’s Paula Ellis is one of the members. The program is a joint-partnership between Iowa Corn and the Iowa Soybean Association.
Ellis and her husband Jeff farm close to 1,700 acres northwest of Primrose. The Ellis’  are farming a generational farm that was started by her grandparents. They were recognized for 100 years on the land at a ceremony in Des Moines last year.
CommonGround is a medium for women in the farming industry to reach out to women consumers primarily living in urban areas. Most of those women, according to CommonGood, are two to three generations removed from family farming. The group regularly blogs and posts information about food and conservation, farming best practices, and hosts events.
Ellis said it’s a dynamic of moms trusting moms and reaching out to women with ideas right off the farm.
“We range from everything across the state. I focus more on the corn and soybean and the conservation side of things,” Ellis said from her home Wednesday afternoon.
“We’ve got hog farmers, cattle farmers, and everything in this group of ladies.”
Ellis joined in 2019 before the pandemic hit, but said it turned out to be okay because they were able to get messages out through social media. She said the group formed around 2000.
“They felt there was a need to have the female's voice out there talking to moms instead of just reading everything off the Internet.”
She said the platform is reactive for moms who are looking for more information about the food they are putting on their family tables and the impacts of farming. She said the group also puts out polls about best hamburgers, tenderloins, ice cream, and then features the local establishments and where they  access their beef, pork, and dairy. There are also polls for bakeries for use of grains and oils produced by Iowa farmers, and to stay local.
But Ellis' day doesn’t stop with social media posts. This is her family farm and she’s involved heavily in the production side of the business. Her husband joined the farm full-time when Paula’s father retired.
"My grandparents purchased the farm with an 80-acre tract. My dad and uncle farmed together. I was farming with my dad  until he retired. Then Jeff retired from his town job and went full-time on the farm."
The two are heavy into soil conservation practices and Ellis previously served as a governor-appointed Iowa Soil and Water Conservation committee member representing the southeast part of the state.
“We try to conserve and do as many different conservation practices as we can on our farms. We no-till everything. We don’t till up the soil and we plant right into the standing stalks or we’ll plant cover crops, which is a cereal rye. That captures all the nutrients that are left in the soil and they turn up nice and green.”
Then sometimes they will terminate the cover crops before planting. Other times they just plant the corn or soybeans, whichever is in rotation, right into the rye. She said it’s important for them to help with water quality and making sure they are being good stewards of the land.
Ellis said she does a lot of the planting on the land when her husband is tendering fertilizer and seed.

"My husband has a sprayer and he keeps busy with that. I do all the combining in the fall, that's my favorite job."
She doesn’t have auto-steer in the combine, but she does have it in the planting tractor.
She said technology has come leaps and bounds.
“It looks like inside a cockpit. I have a monitor for the planter, a monitor telling me how everything is going in the planter, to knowing how many seeds it's dropping and the spacing. I have monitors for the fertilizer valves, monitors for the tractor itself, and then shut-off valves in case I would need to shut anything off manually.”
Ellis has a two-year farm management degree from Muscatine Community College, as an applied science degree, but the rest of her knowledge is experience-based.
She said being a woman in a farming business definitely has the feel of being a minority, but she said that makes it more of a challenge that she welcomes.
“Jeff and I are partners in this operation and we make these decisions together,” Paula said.
She said CommonGround has helped her network with other women across the state.
“It’s a unique bond that you get to see other people like me,” she said.
“We are a minority, in general. Farmers represent about 1% of the population and, when you put women in on top of that, now you have a very small percent. But you’re seeing more of it now. Daughters are coming back to the family farms.”
She said you see a lot more of that in the vet field where women have more of that ability to take care of animals. She said a lot of the landowners are older women now.
She said the winter time comes with selling grain and then a lot of meetings. Jeff was just elected to the Iowa Soybean Association Board of Directors representing southeast Iowa.
“We have a lot of local corn and soybean meetings. We just had the Lee County Corn & Soybean annual banquet with the cattlemen. So there’s a lot of that type of thing going on now.”
Ellis is also a volunteer with the Lee County 4H so she’s trying to get to those meetings and Lee County Fair meetings. She went to CommonGround meetings in Des Moines for some training and guest speakers.
She said the economics of farming is something to be closely monitored, but the famly farm has been successful and remains that way.
She said the proposed trade tariffs are changing the market landscape, literally, on an hour-by-hour basis.
“There’s always that question in your mind. But we’re farmers and we have to be optimistic about things,” Ellis said.
“We plant a seed, and then basically it’s out of our control as far as mother nature. We pray for rain and we pray for dry…all at the right time.”