MER ROUGE — Meryl Kennedy’s story begins in a truck, driving along with her father round her household’s rice farm as a baby rising up in northeast Louisiana.

“He cherished to take me on the market,” she recalled. “Drive round for hours and hours.”

Elton Kennedy cherished farming, cherished the fields, and cherished the rice enterprise he had constructed on land he first farmed in 1964. As the daddy of 4 daughters, he needed them to be concerned.

Meryl, the youngest, did not share her father’s love of the fields or his “dusty little workplace in Mer Rouge.”

She left. Her first cease was boarding college in Virginia. The following was the College of Georgia. She majored in worldwide relations — the sort of factor you examine in case your plan is to get far, distant from a 500-person city in Morehouse Parish the place the flat expanses of farms and timberlands stretch to the Arkansas state line.

Her subsequent cease was to be the College of Oxford, for a grasp’s diploma in Latin American research. However Elton had a card to play.

He’d pay for Oxford, however provided that Meryl got here again to Morehouse Parish and labored for him for the summer time.

And that’s the place the plot turns.

She took the deal and for a summer time, Meryl watched her father work. One minute, he was discussing farming strategies. The following, he was speaking to merchants within the Chicago commodities pits, hedging manufacturing based mostly on modifications in world markets. It was an eye-opening expertise.

“For a 21-year previous, that was very thrilling,” she stated.

From Assistant to CEO

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Kennedy by no means made it to England.

After beginning as her father’s assistant, she’s now the president of a household agriculture enterprise that’s grown properly past farming and rice drying, At 34, she’s additionally turn out to be considered one of Louisiana’s most distinguished agriculture trade leaders.

Kennedy is chairwoman of the USA Rice Miller’s Affiliation. She’s an unbiased director of Origin Financial institution and serves on the boards of a number of different state and nationwide enterprise and trade teams, the place she’s typically the youngest individual and the one lady within the room.

“It is a bit onerous to imagine that I’m the primary lady” to chair the Rice Miller’s Affiliation, she stated.

Kennedy can also be a vocal advocate for farming and rural points, and he or she represents a brand new crop of farm house owners — lots of whom are girls — who’re charting a unique path than the final technology.

U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow R-Begin, whose district consists of Morehouse Parish, has watched Kennedy in conferences and different settings. She stated that Kennedy’s fearlessness in principally older and predominantly male settings was “inspiring” and stated she was a grasp of delivering “sugar on a knife.”

“When she spoke, she commanded the room,” Letlow stated. “She had no trepidation.”

‘Conquered the earth’

Kennedy’s workplace is in a renovated, century-old home a pair blocks from downtown Mer Rouge. Its expansive entrance porch appears to be like out over farmlands that evoke the agricultural period of her father.

However the whole lot else signifies the arrival of the millennial technology to the farming trade.

The workplace is painted in crisp white and grey. A contemporary white government chair sits behind the easy picket desk with a microphone hooked up, the place she information episodes of an occasional podcast referred to as “Rice Up Your Bowl.”

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One wall is embellished with a large American flag — she describes herself as very patriotic — and on the others dangle a portray of Surprise Girl and an image of her toddler daughter bestride the moon.

“As a result of girls have already conquered the earth,” Kennedy laughs.

She has a professionally designed web site that markets her manufacturers and consists of hyperlinks to her social media accounts.

And as an alternative of bib overalls, she’s carrying denims, quick black boots and a inexperienced leather-based jacket that would not look misplaced in a Journal Road boutique.

Kennedy’s enterprise is rooted in rice, however her time in agriculture has been outlined by increasing into adjoining companies with better progress potential.

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In 2012, she helped her father discovered Kennedy Rice Mill, constructing a sprawling advanced in Mer Rouge that processes thousands and thousands of kilos of rice yearly and generates $70 million in annual income.

When a West Monroe cookie dough manufacturing unit almost closed in 2016, Meryl purchased it. Neighbors, LLC is now one of many main producers of cookie dough for fundraisers.

It employs 150 individuals, about the identical quantity as within the rice mill.

In 2019, Kennedy and her sisters launched 4Sisters Rice, which is sustainably farmed, natural rice that’s bought in additional than 5,000 shops. And early within the pandemic when provide chains seized up, they constructed a direct-to-consumer web site in a way of weeks.

Her success has not gone unnoticed. She and her sisters have been featured in promotional supplies by Kellogg’s, in Southern Residing Journal and in a number of trade publications.

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Throughout a tour of her rice mill and interviews to debate her advocacy work, Kennedy allowed that at occasions the knife’s edge Letlow referenced will get a bit sharper. Some have informed her that she resembles Beth Dutton, the flinty daughter of Kevin Costner’s character within the hit tv present Yellowstone, who is thought for her caustic, ruthless method.

A few of that was on show in September at a gathering of state financial improvement leaders and native companies in West Monroe. Officers fielded principally congenial questions and provided details about applications that have been accessible to help rural parishes.

However little had been stated about serving to parishes repair their very own crumbling infrastructure.

Kennedy rose to talk.

“I did not hear something at this time about rural roads,” she stated. “In order that’s perhaps one thing y’all might help us concentrate on.”

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She credit her father for forcing her into conditions the place she needed to study to carry her personal, she stated.

“No one ought to actually be intimidated to talk their thoughts,” she stated.

A rising quantity

Kennedy is a part of an rising variety of girls taking management roles in agriculture.

In keeping with the United State’s Division of Agriculture’s Farm Census for 2017, the newest 12 months for which knowledge is on the market, the variety of girls in farming in Louisiana went up greater than 20%, to greater than 15,000 from 5 years earlier than.

Denise Cannatella, who along with her husband and son helps run her household’s 4,000 acre farm St. Landry Parish, has seen the modifications come over the previous couple of a long time.

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Cannatella stated the annual Girls in Agriculture convention in Louisiana which she helps manage, has grown from about 150 or 200 attendees in 2017 to greater than 500 earlier this 12 months.

“After I first bought married, it was principally a person’s world,” she stated.

Amelia Kent, who runs a 1400-acre cattle ranch in East Feliciana, has additionally seen the evolution.

“After I began exhibiting up with my very own pickup and trailer, you would see some males decide their jaws off the ground,” the 39-year-old Kent stated.

Like Kennedy, she hasn’t shied away from management roles, serving on the meat trade council and on a nationwide beef board. She’s presently on the Farm Bureau Livestock Advisory Committee.

“I am unable to inform you what number of occasions I am going to a gathering and I’m the one lady there,” she stated. “However the probabilities that I’m chairing that assembly are fairly excessive.”

‘Unbelievable wave’

Kennedy calls the rise in girls in agriculture “an unbelievable wave.”

She refers again her father — who took her on these lengthy weekend drives and made that deal to fund her tutorial ambitions — with pushing her in the precise course.

“He gave me the chance to chart my very own path,” she stated. “There is no method I might be right here with out him.”

Now she’s passing these classes alongside. Some male farmers she is aware of have requested her to mentor their daughters who’re curious about stepping into the enterprise.

“It is thrilling to see,” she stated.