Credit: Nick Romanenko

Michell Hartung gets ready for spring planting with the help of her brother, Kenneth Lea. He lives in Florida, but returns often to the Hartung farm in Lopatcong Township.

Four years ago, Michell Hartung and her husband Gary were happily growing grain near Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Like many farm wives, Michell had fallen in love with farming after falling in love with a farmer. Their dates often included Gary’s farm chores, and frequently began or ended with a ride on a tractor. They married, raised a daughter, and continued running the farm that had been in the Hartung family for generations.

Then, suddenly, Gary died. Among the many calls a devastated Michell made in the days after his death was one to the bank to reschedule the closing on a loan they had applied for to expand their operation.  “They said, ‘Oh, we dropped that because you won’t be able to run the farm,’” Michell Hartung recalled.

She has been trying to prove the bank wrong ever since, running the 500-acre operation (200 owned, 300 leased) with whatever help she can get. Her brother Kenneth Lea, who lives in Florida, flies up regularly to help out. A local police officer, who worked on the farm as a teenager, has pitched in. “And my father-in-law, Adrain Hartung, who is 87, has stood by my side and continued to farm,” she said.

Michell knows how to grow wheat and soybeans. But she needs to know more about marketing her crops, record-keeping, insurance, and estate planning, which is what brought her to Annie’s Project, a six-session seminar on farm management aimed specifically at women, this past winter. Now, with planting season upon her, Hartung will put what she learned in that class to work.

Annie’s Project, sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture, is based on a real farm woman, Annette Fleck, who spent her lifetime learning how to be an involved business partner with her husband. The program was created by her daughter, Ruth Hambleton, who became a cooperative extension educator in Illinois. The seminar series is offered in 22 states, usually through the local extension service.

Rutgers' coooperative extension, part of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station's (NJAES), presented the course for the first time this winter, with sessions taking place simultaneously in Hackettstown, Warren County, and Cape May Courthouse, Cape May County. Rutgers extension faculty, county agents, and other guest speakers take part in the classes.

Robin Brumfield, a farm economist who oversees the course for NJAES, said, the content is similar to workshops that have been available to farmers through the extension service for years. “But if we offered it without specifying women, we found that women didn’t come out,” she said.  The course was tailored for New Jersey conditions by Brumfield and her Annie’s Project team – Barbara O’Neill, professor of agricultural economics; Jenny Carleo, county agent for Cape May County; Stephen Komar, county agent for Sussex County; and, Robert Mickel, county agent for Hunterdon County.

The classes have been adapted for the specific needs of New Jersey farmers. Agriculture – and family farms, in particular – may be under siege in much of the country, but here in New Jersey agriculture is holding its own, Brumfield says. New Jersey farmers are innovative, creative, and diverse; but many of them hang onto their farms by holding outside jobs, and they face the same challenges of any business in tough economic times. It isn’t enough to know how to grow things.

“We’re not a producer-oriented economy any more,” Brumfield told the Cape May Court House class in February. “We’re a consumer-oriented economy, so you have to think like your customer. What are you doing that nobody else is doing? What need do your customers have that nobody else is meeting?”

Jennifer Lamonaca, who participated in Annie’s Project this winter, sees a growing need in her community: the desire for people to know that their food is fresh and organically grown on farms near their homes. So, two years ago she started a community-supported farm on one rented acres in Galloway Township, near Atlantic City. Unlike Hartung, who shared her husband’s passion for farming, Lamonaca fell for farming after falling in love with a man who didn’t want to farm, at least at first.  Ryan Lamonaca runs a graphic design business. He helps out occasionally, but the graphic design business is his main focus.

Lamonaca, a former marine researcher who worked, among other places, at the Rutgers University Marine Field Station near Tuckerton, New Jersey, came to learn about the money end of her operation. Her business, Sea Salt CSA, is a community-supported agriculture program  in which members join the farm for the season and receive a share of crops in exchange for payment in full prior to the season. An alternative is work the farm during the season for a discount. Lamonaca’s operation rents about three acres from Art Brown, New Jersey’s former secretary of agriculture, and Ryan Lamonaca’s uncle. Ken Able, Lamonaca’s former Rutgers boss, lives nearby and is a member.

Carol Przewozny and her husband Ben raise beef cattle, pigs, chickens, and turkeys on their farm in Glen Gardner, New Jersey. She, too, fell in love with a farmer before falling in love with farming, and now her ambition is to farm full time. Annie’s Project, she said, is part of her effort to make that happen.  “My husband has always farmed,” Przweozny said. “When we first got married, we lived for a couple of years in a house that was not a farm, and he was absolutely miserable.”

Przewozny and her husband both have day jobs – she teaches special education, and he work in the parks and recreation department in Readington, not far from their farm. They go straight from those jobs to caring for their livestock and marketing their produce.

“We’ve never taken a vacation,” Przewozny said. “That’s okay; I’m a homebody. I love farming. When I started, I had no clue, but once you get into it, you’re hooked.”