There are two schools of thought when it comes to onboarding rookies in professional sports: You toss them right into the deep end and see if they can swim, or you ease them in slowly, letting them watch and learn how to be a pro from the veterans in the locker room. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and there’s no firm consensus on which method results in consistent long-term success.
Ohio second-generation farmer Paige Pence will likely be brought along gently as she gains experience and learns the intricacies of the family cropping business. Pence’s parents, Brent and Christine, are in fine shape and still have that burning, fiery passion when it comes to farming the 4,500 acres they have pieced together over the first two decades of their only daughter’s life.
“I don’t think they are planning on retiring or handing this off to me anytime soon,” laughs Pence, 22, having just packed up her college dorm room and trekked home to the New Carlisle, Ohio, farmhouse she grew up in. She graduated this spring from Western Illinois University with a bachelor’s degree in ag science and a minor in animal science.
Meeting with the family, you can tell right from the jump Brent and Christine are thrilled to get their daughter back. They’ve been managing things as a partnership since young Brent secured his initial 123 acres of rented ground back in the early ‘90s. He did not come from a farming background, but Christine grew up on a dairy farm, so agriculture was not a completely foreign concept. Through sheer perseverance and with some help from friends, neighbors and family, they’ve built an impressive operation to one day pass down to their only child.
Up to the Challenge
That’s a fact that surely makes Brent’s handful of farming mentors from over the years as proud as peacocks.
“She’s going to get a whole new learning experience this summer,” Brent says. “We’re going to set her loose. After all the traveling that my wife and I have done for her livestock shows, we’re going to get a little bit back from her.”
The plan moving forward is to have Paige get her feet wet running the farm’s fleet of equipment and pitching in wherever she can leave her mark. She’ll be shouldering a healthy load of farm duties, with her parents guiding her along the way. She’s more than up to the task.
“During my senior year it started to hit me that I was ready to go home, because when you’re not here on the farm, you’re not able to be as present,” she says. “I was ready to come home and start making the changes that were going to help our family.”
The Pences have yet to sit down at the kitchen table and talk about those changes, like profit splits or how many acres Paige will eventually take over and manage on her own. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be tethered to their hips all summer, either. That conversation will come in due time, but for now it’s all about getting her up and running and feeling comfortable as the second generation on the farm.
“I definitely could see them giving me some fields to manage by myself, because I think they know I’m independent, and I’m always looking for ways to improve and learn,” Paige says. “So obviously, with a little bit of help, I could see them giving me more independence, and I’m on the side of doing that, too.”
Carving Out a Niche
Aside from her day-to-day duties of helping plant, fertilize, spray and harvest the family’s crops, the recent college graduate hopes her parents will lean on her social media skills. She’s built a strong following online and she clearly has a knack for leveraging those connections and eyeballs to grow her custom graphic design side hustle. Now she can use that experience to help develop the farm’s digital presence, which has become crucial during this day and age.
No matter how she is “set loose on the farm,” in her father’s words, this has always been the plan.
“I have always grown up around farming, so I don’t see myself ever leaving,” Paige says. “There are always different things that need to be done, and aside from showing [livestock] over the last decade, I’ve always been around helping out. I don’t see myself moving anywhere else. I feel like everything I need is right here.”
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