Her response was delightful: “What?!”
It was both a question and an exclamation.
We had called Jana Gaebert to inform her that she’s the recipient of the 2026 GFN Kleckner Global Farm Leader Award.
This is always a fun call to make. We get to notify a talented farmer that he or she will receive a significant recognition. I look forward to it every year.
And the winner is always surprised. This was perhaps doubly true for Jana. When she heard the good news, she was driving her car. She had to pull to the side of the road.
There are great words to describe her sense of astonishment: She was flabbergasted, flummoxed, and gobsmacked.
But there is no doubt, Jana is utterly deserving of this high honor. In the four years since she joined the Global Farmer Network, she has emerged as one of the brightest lights on the agricultural scene in her home country of Germany as well as in the European Union.
The namesake of the award, Dean Kleckner, would have loved Jana. He was one of America’s great farm leaders. He was a champion of farmers in the United States and around the world, especially in their pursuit of free trade and access to technology.
And Dean was constantly on the lookout for young leaders to cultivate. The best farmers are stewards of the land who think about the future. Dean wanted to invest in the next generation.
The Global Farmer Network launched the award in 2007, while Dean was still with us as chairman of the GFN Board of Directors. Following his death in 2015, we named it after him. We like to joke that if the Nobel Committee had a prize for farmers, it would be the Kleckner Award.
Like the Nobel Prizes, it’s truly a global award. The first winners came from the Philippines. Others have hailed from Australia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Portugal.
Jana is making a big difference in her native Germany.
I first met her at a GFN event in Frankfurt. That’s where I started to learn her story. She grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in what used to be called East Germany. Unlike many farmers, who have family backgrounds in agriculture, Jana chose farming. She’s first generation. This fact alone makes her unusual and inspiring.
She’s also a total professional in her management of livestock, grassland, and crops on 4,000 hectares south of Berlin. She oversees a large herd of dairy cows as well as beef cattle and grows a wide range of crops, including wheat, barley, sunflowers, alfalfa, and corn. Because the soil on her farm is sandy and receives little rain, she practices water conservation and other sustainable practices.
This makes Jana a good farmer. What really sets her apart, however, is her leadership. She is a powerful advocate for farmers. In 2024, she became active in opposing the German government’s attempt to impose new taxes and restrictions on food producers.
Rather than meekly accepting a miserable fate, Jana forced her way into the conversation. Government ministers, legislators, and others have listened to her. She gave farmers a voice at the negotiating table.
Farmers know all about cross pollination, which involves combining the genetic material from separate plants. It leads to better seeds that grow into healthy crops that produce strong harvests.
Jana has applied this farming practice to politics, in a figurative cross pollination. Earlier this year, she wrote a column that described her efforts to reach out to Germany’s Green Party and find areas of mutual interest as the EU debates its agricultural policies.
Farmers and the Greens don’t always get along, but Jana refuses to give up. She is determined to find ways to work together—and to persuade the critics of modern food production that they are wiser to see farmers not as problems to confront but as partners in seeking solutions.
If these efforts bear fruit, perhaps Jana will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Today, we recognize Jana as a worthy recipient of the Kleckner Award.
