A lot of people dream of leaving their everyday 9-5 job to pursue something they’re more passionate about. Very few actually go through with it, but one Urbandale woman did just that last year when she launched FarmHer.
FarmHer is a website dedicated to capturing the everyday lives of women involved in the agriculture industry and it was created by Marjorie Guyler-Alaniz, who goes by Marji.
Marji had been selling crop insurance for 11 years, and was ready for a change of scenery. She had studied graphic design, photography and journalism at Iowa State University and really wasn’t putting those skills to much use in the insurance field.
While attending a friend’s Super Bowl party last February, she said that like most people, she was blown away by the now iconic “So God made a farmer” truck ad for Dodge Ram Trucks. The ad has 17 million views on YouTube and an estimated 108 million people watched Super Bowl XLVII in the U.S. alone.
“I thought it was beautiful, just like everybody else did. Then, about a month later, I read an article talking about the lack of women shown in the commercial,” Marji said.
The commercial is two minutes and two seconds long and she said she only recalled seeing one woman in the commercial doing actual farm work. Seeing this inaccurate portrayal of women in the industry inspired her.
“Honestly, I worked in agriculture for 11 years and in the beginning, I worked in the marketing side,” she said. “It struck me that I had never really seen much for images of women in agriculture. Growing up in Iowa, and in the country, you know that women are there and they are involved on pretty much every family farm.”
Marji said this thought kept crossing over her mind: “Why don’t we see the woman as part of the farm community as well?” After dwelling on it for a bit, an answer to her problem soon came to her.
“I literally woke up the next night, in the middle of the night, woke my husband up and I was like, ‘Hey, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to start photographing women in agriculture,’” Marji recalled.
Just like that FarmHer was born. By April 2013, Marji had her first farm visit scheduled, which she admits was a daunting task. At the time, there was no website, she had no verified credentials, nor any photos to show farmers that this was indeed a real concept.
She believes the uniqueness of this project is why so many of those initial women agreed to take part in helping getting FarmHer off the ground.
“It has been crazy and it seems to have struck a nerve out there to fulfill a need … I don’t know, really, anybody doing something like I’m doing. I think women that are involved in farms and ranches have said, ‘Hey, yeah, we like this. We like that it shows what we do and that we are there helping on a day-to-day basis,’” Marji said.
They not only like the images, they like the name: FarmHer, she said.
Marji started this project by visiting farms mostly in Iowa. This soon spread to other portions of the Midwest and U.S.
“I’ve been to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and randomly to Florida,” she said.
Her website went live last July, and coupled with positive press coverage and word of mouth, she said she has expanded her reach considerably.
“The emails started rolling in from all over the county. Canada, Mexico, South Africa you name it. In Europe and so many invitations saying, ‘Hey, come visit my farm’ or ‘Come visit these women that I know in the area,’” Marji said.
She said she is keeping a list of all the places and hopes to visit them someday to shoot when she has the adequate resources to do so. For now, she is focusing on growing the FarmHer brand. The website sells FarmHer and RanchHer T-Shirts, something she implemented by popular request.
Initially, she gave the T-shirts to her subjects as a keepsake from her visit, but others soon started asking if she could make those available publicly.
Another project she is working on for the upcoming year, is adding a social media component to the website. Marji said with that a lot of the female farmers she’s been in contact requested this as way to network, socialize and empathize with other women in the industry.
Marji has also been invited to speak with different women agricultural groups, including holding a panel at this year’s Iowa Women in Agriculture conference.
She said she created this website just to show people that women are farmers and ranches too, but Marji said she’s most proud of another unexpected result from her website.
“I’ve gotten a good amount (of emails), surprisingly enough, of women saying, ‘Oh my gosh. I have these days where I think what am I doing? I’m the only person out there trying to do this on my own … I feel so isolated and like it’s an uphill battle,’” she said.
“Then they see these pictures of other women doing the exact same thing they’re doing and they’ll say, ‘It gives me hope,’ and ‘It renews me.’ It makes me feel excited and realize that I’m doing it for a greater good.”
You can view more of her work at www.FarmHer.com.