Blazing Trails While Caring for the Community

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Meet Sarah Morton

Sarah Morton is a force of nature. The third-generation farmer from Ruckersville, Virginia, runs Cattle Run Farm with her siblings and other family members. As owner of Cattle Run Farm LLC Food Hub, she works to supply locally sourced protein to food banks across the region.

Morton is also executive director of the Piedmont Regional Workforce Board, a fellow of VA Techs Virginia Agriculture Leaders Obtaining Results (VALOR), a founding member of The Minority and Veteran Farmers of the Piedmont, co-chair of Piedmont Action Coalition on Hunger (PACH), and a member of Virginia’s Workforce Board Access and Equity Committee.

I first met Morton at the Women in Agribusiness Summit in Denver earlier this year, where she left a room full of women feeling energized and empowered after speaking as part of a female producer panel. In this episode, we talked about equity, equality, and how we can all better support each other in agriculture.

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Transcript

Please note: This transcript has not been edited.

Lisa Foust Prater: Welcome to the 15 Minutes with a Farmer Podcast from Successful Farming, I’m your host, Lisa Foust Prater. My guest today is Sarah Morton, a third-generation farmer from Virginia. Through her nonprofit and community efforts, she works to promote equity, access, local food sovereignty, and sustainability.

In each episode, I have a quick 15 minute conversation with a farmer to hear their story and share their experience, expertise, and life lessons. 

Lisa Foust Prater: So I understand that you are part of the third generation of your family’s farm there in Virginia. Can you tell me a little bit about the farm’s history and your family’s history on the land?

Sarah Morton: Absolutely. So we are third generation. We moved that to that farm and back in the 1970s with my parents. I actually was taken there right out of the hospital when I was born. So we moved there and it was, it’s really so compelling for me because that’s where I became grounded into this, this world of agriculture with my siblings. It’s five of us, my brother and my sister and I.

Both my grandparents, they farmed and my dad decided that he wanted to have his own farm. So that’s when he branched off and purchased the farm that we’re on there in Virginia. And back in 2011, he decided to pass it over to us because he said, I’m finished, I’m done, I’m tired. And his health would be into decline. So we just decided to develop a strategy for us to be able to say, how do we maintain it? 

I specifically said we can’t continue to do the things that they did because, you know, what they did was they used that farm to raise us, to take care of us, to cultivate a culture of love, family and community. And that’s exactly what that farm did. 

And so now we are now creating it so that it takes care of our community and our family and friends. We have our own food hub where I support 15 food pantries across our region to make sure that they have protein to support their communities across the 16 different food pantries. So, you know, we’ve always been a servant organization. We’ve always been a servant family and that is the core. mean, our brand is teach, serve and grow.

And that came, I mean, I’m a former educator. My brother’s a retired military. And my mother was such a teacher. And of course we grow off of the land. So that’s our brand, Teach, Serve and Grow, which is really compelling for us because it’s one thing to have an organization or have a business, but then understanding what is your brand? What’s your story? What problems are you trying to solve in the community? And we’re a very solution-focused organization and a family.

Lisa Foust Prater: That is so beautiful. Just taking care of each other. I mean, really, if you’re not doing that, then what’s the point of any of it, really?

Sarah Morton: So we have this whole protein food resiliency program that I started back in 2019 to provide fresh locally sourced protein, poultry, pork, goat, lamb, beef and eggs to food pantries because those are items that are very hard and they’re very expensive.

But I go out here and I try to find grants that will support the food resiliency, but it also supports the longevity of our small farms. We have to help these small farmers find new niches in order to survive and maintain. And I work with lot of producers and I say to them, don’t send your culled cows to the livestock market. Let’s turn them into hamburger and let’s get a fair market value for that meat so that we can donate it to food pantries. 

And they like to showcase that in the food pantries because the community now is able to connect with that producer or connect to say, wow, the hamburger that I put in my chili last night came from you know, the farm three miles down the road. So that’s really compelling and really connecting people again. 

Lisa Foust Prater: And so great for the people receiving that beef that, you know, they deserve to know where their food comes from too. It’s not just the people who can pay $10 a pound.

Sarah Morton: And I tell you, to be able to put $100,000 back in 10, 12 producers’ pocket, it may not sound like a lot, but it’ll pay for taxes, it’ll pay for fuel, it’ll pay for something, So it’s all about helping and supporting one another and figuring out strategies on how we can support that.

Lisa Foust Prater: You talked about how, you know, sometimes feeling like people are judging a book by its cover. And that was a thing that just echoed. I was sitting in the back of the room and I could just see heads nodding all across the room. And whether it was women of color, all the women just felt like, yeah, I have had that happen. So I’m wondering if you can just speak a little to that about that experience and how you’ve handled that.

Sarah Morton: Yeah, as I tell people about my journey in ag, I mean, started very young in agriculture. I was five when my father introduced me to my first 4-H project, which was raising pork and swine. But I went on into majoring at college and went on to work for USDA and work for some other ag companies. And as an ag research sales, I was in ag chem sales.

Every time I would attend work or go to work or show up for work, they would be like, “Yeah, we’re waiting for the new person.” I’m like, “That would be me.” And I have this look on their face like, “What are you doing here?” And so really trying to debunk that. so being able to, the adversities that we face in this very privileged society, but you know what? It just gave me additional energy and fire, right? I mean, I don’t let anybody tell me no, right? I mean, I’m one of these individuals where I will take down barriers. I will give people reasons to tell me yes rather than no.

When I showed up at, you know, to be the meat grader and, you know, I’d walk in and they were like, yeah, we’re waiting on the meat grader. Get here so we can start for them. Like, you know, that would be me. And they’re like, what? You know, like you women. I’m like, absolutely. So, you know, being able to be in, you know, hear this, you know, young feminine, you know, brown girl out here. You know, as I said, I’m a brown girl in a white man’s world, but I survived, right? And so it just gave me the fuel that I needed to show people that you cannot judge a book by a cover. You need to open it up and read it. 

We could be such a stronger society. When I looked at what happened with the hurricanes in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and saw how these communities rallied, I mean, these people came together, that it wasn’t race, wasn’t about socioeconomic class, it wasn’t about party, it was about survival skills, people jumping in water to save animals. And I’m like, this is what a sense of community is. This is what a best practice building and bridging communities of good practice, that’s what it is. And agriculture, it’s a great community because it’s very diverse.

We come in all shapes and sizes, we come in all different colors. You look at the hue of the colors of the trees, of the forestry, you look at the hue of the flowers, you look at the hue of the animals. We’re such a divergent organization. And so for us to look at us and single us out and shoot daggers just because I don’t look like somebody or the traditional look, we should not do that because some of us are making some huge strides and huge impacts in the industry.

And we need to uplift one another and specifically women. We as women need to get behind one another and support one another and not judge us because of what we look like or what our physical makeup looks like. All of us have something to contribute to this body of work. We need to lead into those strengths. And where we don’t have a strength, we need to find somebody that does have that strength because what makes us a stronger and a more phenomenal team. 

And so, you know, we have to uplift. We are not competitors. We are collaborators. We have to dismantle these silos because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to support one another. And if there are doors where people can be in senior level leadership, we need to put the right women in those positions. And we need to stop creating gatekeeping systems that prevent us from climbing the ladder in the industry. 

Lisa Foust Prater: I feel fired up again. That’s so good. That’s so excellent. You’re so good at that. Yeah, you know, that’s one reason why I love going to Women in Ag conferences in general. I feel like when you go to those conferences, there’s an understanding that’s already there. These women already know your backstory. They already understand so much about your life that you don’t have to get into. They understand how things are with the busyness and with the challenges that you have and just, you don’t have to stop and explain that to them. They get you already.

And they want, they’re there because they want to support each other and they want to have support. And I just think they’re, and they want to learn. You know, it’s a great way to find support, to find mentors there or someone to mentor when you’re there. And I just think they’re so empowering and I love them. So I go anytime I can, not just as a journalist, but as, you know, a woman in ag myself, I love them. So that Women in Agribusiness Summit I thought was fantastic. And it was very empowering, I felt.

Sarah Morton: Absolutely, absolutely. It is so compelling when we are in a room with such strong, like-minded individuals who’re really there for the same cause, right? I mean, we came there to create a networking and an ecosystem of support, an ecosystem of collaboration, of convening, of just really looking at how do we coordinate this effort in a bigger way so that we can give voice to the, you know, and we don’t have to lose our femininity to be in this industry. You know, we don’t have to do that, but we can also let people know that we are strong-willed, strong-minded women, that if we put our minds to something, we can get it done. 

Now, you know, I know there are certain things that we cannot do, but, you know, we’re not going to allow that to be the barrier that prevents us from being in the space where we feel like we can contribute. We are contributors, you know? We’re not trying to take over a man’s job, but we want to contribute to it because we want to help them work smarter, not harder, right? I mean, we want to create that lean processes that supports us so that we can spend more time with families and look at better processes and systems that can help us move the industry forward.

Lisa Foust Prater: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. It’s all about working together. And I think we need to do a better job of that in ag in general, from the farm to the corporations in the industry all around. how can we be better allies to each other? Whether we’re looking at men supporting women, women supporting each other, white farmers supporting farmers of color. How can we do a better job of just helping each other and being more supportive in general?

Sarah Morton: Look, listen, and observe. Invite us to the table. Be intentional. Be intentional about the invitation. Don’t extend the invitation because you want to fill the percentage or you want to fill a quota. But be intentional about having the right people to be along your side. The right teammate that you want on your team to help move the ball down the court, as I tell people.

Find the right colleague that you want, whether they’re black, brown, know, whatever color you want them to be, female, non-female, LGBTQ, whatever. But open the door of intentionality that I do want to help us to create a more divergent lens in the agrarian space and open that door for opportunity. You will never grow if you don’t open the door of opportunity.

And growth is so critical for this industry because it is ever changing. And so we have to find the right professional scholarship for every sector within the industry. And we have to determine who’s the best person to fill those positions. And we have to be open because and be open to the opportunity that the person may not look like the traditional look that you’re used to having in those positions.

But we have to be willing, we have to also be open to the next generation that’s coming in, that are coming in with a lot of good scholarship in the technology industry. So being open to building a more of a multi-generational ecosystem of workers so that we can continue to move the industry forward and create opportunities that will streamline processes but be more fluid and provide some bigger return on the investments.

Lisa Foust Prater: That is fantastic advice. So in closing, earlier we talked about your grandfathers on both sides, working on the farm, working with your family. But I want to ask about your grandmothers and what you think they would say, seeing you sitting here today, a successful, powerful force of nature woman, lifting other women up and lifting people up in general while you still strive to help your community and work the farm. What would they say seeing you today?

Sarah Morton: They were true pioneers and trailblazers. Both my grandparents, again, they were the backbone of the family. mean, my grandmothers, they cooked off the land. I mean, they ran educational trainings off the farm. You know, they really did not work. They supported the family with three hot meals, taking them to the fields, bringing them back, you know, doing everything. My grandmother on my mother’s side, she ran educational trainings on food preservation, the whole home economics out of her home. She partnered with other producers to support that so that we could make sure that families were surviving and families had the skills that they needed to survive. I mean, they were true trailblazers and pioneers in their day. 

They would just say, “That’s my girl,” because I was right at their heels. I learned a lot from both my grandparents, grandmothers, but my mother, had seven aunts on my mom. And so to be able to be with strong women who just supported me, I mean, they knew that I loved the land.

I’m an executive director of a nonprofit here in Virginia. you know, but my first profession is a farmer and I want people to know that I’m a producer and I produce for my community. And I want to make sure that I take care of my community. And, you know, I hope one day somebody says she was a pioneer and a trailblazer because that’s the reputation that I want, because that’s what my grandparents gave me. And so that’s the legacy that I want to leave.

Lisa Foust Prater: I am sure that that is what they will say. And you know, I think what more could any of us want than for our grandmothers to look at us and say, “That’s my girl.” That’s beautiful. I love it. Sarah.

It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you today. I appreciate your time so much. I know you’re a busy, busy woman, but I have loved talking with you. Again, thank you for your words at the Women in Agribusiness Summit that were so inspiring to me and all the women in that room. And thank you for joining me today.

Sarah Morton: Absolutely Lisa. 

Lisa Foust Prater: Thank you for listening. Open the latest issue of Successful Farming and visit us online at agriculture.com for more interesting features and news for your farm. Join me next week for another episode of 15 Minutes With a Farmer.