I’ve spent the last 16 summers working side by side with my father and brother on the harvest crew. 8 of those summers were spent working with CASE IH operating their test machines and thanks to them I was able to be the first woman to run a few of their newer models.

Growing up my dad would tell me and my sister that if we wanted a truck when we turned 16 we had better get out in the field. More importantly, he taught us that if we wanted to be paid like the boys , we had to work just as hard as them. Thanks to him, I never understood or knew gender inequality in the workplace.

It wasn’t until I moved out on my own that I realized what an important role my mother had played in our harvest crew. She wasn’t in the field working with us but she was the reason the entire family woke up and put on clean work clothes, had a lunch packed for the day and a hot meal when we came in from the fields.

Daddy put us on a combine but Momma is the reason we’re God fearing harvesters.

Sally Walker, the Itty Bitty Combiner