Midwestern farmer Marcia Ruff knows she was created for two main reasons.
“Teaching and farming are probably why God put me on the Earth,” she says. “That’s what I’m supposed to be here for.”
As she splits her time between local kindergarten classrooms and the family farm, she spends each day fulfilling her passions.
“This is really the dream life I had envisioned,” Ruff says. “As a teacher, you educate children and make them ready for the world, but as a farmer, you feed the world.”
Ruff’s passion for tying together agriculture, education and advocacy is what led to her being recognized as the 2023 Top Producer Women In Ag Award winner.
Slow and Steady
Ruff plays an integral role on the Circleville, Ohio, farm she operates with her husband, Mark, and their three children: Matthew, Mitchell and Mae. Over the years, she’s worked hard to help build the operation to what it is now.
“It wasn’t an explosion of acres,” Ruff says. “Nobody was actively farming when we got married 26 years ago, and we started from ground zero and built this up. We started out with 100 to 150 acres in the beginning.”
Mark works as the full-time operator, Matthew and Mitchell drive equipment and Mae is involved with the cattle. Siblings, parents and several full-time employees also play important roles.
As the operation has grown and diversified over the years, so has Marcia’s role. And even when she’s not the one out in the field, she’s been behind the scenes ensuring everything is running smoothly.
“When we first got married, we had a forage business, and I drove the baler almost exclusively. I had my rhyme and my rhythm and my ‘I’ll let you know if I need you’ kind of thing,” she says. “I think the dynamic really changed once we started having kids because I needed to put my attention there. So I became more of the escort vehicle — delivered meals to the field, supervised the 4-H projects, things you can do from home.”
While each person has their specific duty on the operation, Ruff serves as what she describes to be the coordinator of activities, making sure everyone has what they need to achieve success.
Advocate Where You Can
One of the hats Ruff wears to help promote the farm’s activities is social media manager.
“I realized so many people use social media, and I would start to see things and say, ‘why can’t I do that’,” she says. “I think sometimes we forget that what we do is important and interesting, because we do it every day.”
She also uses it as a way to connect the farm with her school’s curriculum.
“Last year, I started taking pictures of my daughter’s pumpkin patch throughout the growing season, and my teacher brain thought ‘these are the things I read to my kids about’,” Ruff says. “I put a video of it on YouTube to show my students and added labels so it goes along with the books we read.”
She shared the video with other teachers, and it now has over 8,000 views.
“I think you have to be an advocate for agriculture and educate people,” Ruff says. “Anything you can do to get information out there and get people interested in agriculture and where their food comes from.”
Showing consumers where their food comes from is something Ruff and her family have taken to the next level.
“Two summers ago, we had foreign exchange students from Indonesia here and we happened to be shipping grain to Indonesia around that time,” she says. “We hosted a luncheon for them and then showed them the combine and showed them the beans that were headed to Jakarta, where they would be getting the exact beans that we were sending. They were very excited, and they were telling us how they would prepare the beans to eat them.”
And while Ruff is an advocate for agriculture anywhere she goes, but as a teacher of 28 years, the classroom will always hold a special place in her heart.
She recently decided to pair her own award money with grant funding and donations to gift agriculture books to all 655 students in her elementary school.
“We live in a farming community, but many of the kids aren’t actively involved,” she says. “They see it every day, and I wanted them to get more information.”
Ruff did a presentation in each classroom at the school, and the students were then able to look through a variety of ag books that had been donated and choose one to keep. A popular title with the students is also one of Ruff’s favorites: “Click Clack Moo.”
“Some kids don’t have books of their own to keep, so that was a treasure for them,” Ruff says. “It wasn’t for a specific reason, and there were no strings attached. It was just that everyone got a book.”
With a large outpouring of support from her community, she hopes to continue this donation in the future.
Innovate and Diversify
Ruff has plenty to share with the farm’s online following between the operation’s seeding business, tile and drainage business, and brand-new container loading facility, all of which are products of the family’s ability to not only solve problems on the farm in innovative ways, but also diversify the operation.
“We raise regular corn, soybean and wheat crops. I think it’s in what we do with them that’s different,” Ruff says.
Inspired by the ways their parents use their resources, each of the Ruff children has thought of new and unique ways to harness the aspects of the operation they enjoy the most — something Marcia and her husband will always encourage.
“I think if they have these ideas, we’re there to encourage it or ask, ‘what can we do to help you’,” she says.
During the pandemic, Matthew began selling ears of corn on Amazon for squirrel and wildlife feed, which, at one point, grew to 150 boxes sold a day and is helping put him through college. Mitchell is marketing his third round of freezer beef directly to consumers and has considered starting a food truck in the future. And Mae has plans to grow her pumpkin patch and garden into a farm stand.
Ruff serves as the connective tissue between these business ventures, whether it’s driving her son to the post office to ship orders or helping her daughter understand gardening fundamentals.
“My kids aren’t allowed to say, ‘I can’t do that.’ They say, ‘I can’t do that yet’,” Ruff says. “So I hope I’m being a good role model and mentoring in that way that they can be confident, independent and do all these things.”
The Meaning of a “Farm Wife”
Ruff doesn’t just mentor her children to find their passion on the farm. She also shares that message with other women in agriculture.
“You can make a place of your own in agriculture; you don’t have to follow your father, your brother or your husband. There’s a place for you to do your own thing, and you can be the leader and an equal partner,” she says. “My role has changed over the years, and there were years that I felt like I didn’t do a lot for everybody, but making a meal and loading it in the car with the kids still helped everyone out.”
As her own day-to-day duties have changed over the years, one thing has remained constant: Ruff and her husband’s partnership in the operation.
“We joke about the term ‘farm wife,’” she says. “I love my husband, and I love being married to him, and I love being the farm wife, but it’s because I also know he’s the ‘farm husband.’ Because we’re partners.”
The pair make all of the farm’s big decisions together, going over the paperwork and discussing the timing.
“Even if I’m not the one physically driving the combine, I’m still in the picture,” Ruff says. “I’ve always told him if you can convince me, you can convince any bank.”
Ruff’s inspiration for this dynamic stems from the relationship she witnessed between her parents while she was growing up.
“My parents worked off farm, and I remember them coming home and dad would be on one tractor and mom would be on the other. They’d build fence together and just work very hard,” she says. “My daughter told me ‘You’re just like Nana; you do all the things,’ and I said ‘Well that’s how I grew up. You do all the things.’”
No matter what a woman wants her role on the operation to be, Ruff recommends making that desire known and using it for the betterment of agriculture.
“You hear women who say, ‘I’m just a farm wife.’ I’m like, take the ‘just’ out of that. There’s no such thing,” she says. “Put your desire out there, and do the things you want to do. You can always be an advocate and you can educate people, but just be an asset to the industry.”
As far as where Ruff’s role on the farm will go in the coming years, she hopes to take more of an active role in the day-to-day operations as she nears the end of her teaching career, but no matter what that looks like, she knows she will be fulfilled.
“I think success is all about your personal satisfaction with your life and the direction that you’ve chosen to take, striving to meet your goals and doing something with meaning,” she says. “In those terms, I’d say I’m
very successful.”
