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Communicating a love for ag

ND farmer shares agriculture’s story

Carie Moore looks out from atop a straw pile at CrocusView-Moore Farms. Submitted Photo

ROCK LAKE – Summers on her grandparents’ farm near Minot instilled a love for agriculture in Carie Marshall Moore that she can’t help but share with others. Through her communications company and volunteer work, Moore educates consumers, youth and others about the industry.

Moore and her husband, Jason, operate CrocusView-Moore Farms near Rock Lake in Towner County. Moore is actively engaged in production, raising soybeans, wheat, barley, canola and oats, as well as in assisting with equipment repairs and maintenance.

Tractor Rounds + Coffee Grounds is her agriculture consulting and communications business. She edits and designs newsletters, creates social media posts and conducts agricultural communications via video, print and digital media.

Tractor Rounds + Coffee Grounds stemmed from the Moores’ former agritourism business, which they had started about six years ago and ran for about three years.

“We did a pumpkin patch, a small corn maze,” Moore said. “We had chickens, sheep, pigs, calves.”

Youth with 4-H, Scouting and school eco-education programs would come to get hands-on farm experiences.

The Moores received a grant through the state Agricultural Products Utilization Committee that helped buy supplies and set up a shed. Then a tornado came through and took out everything.

“At that point, again, I was just starting to help full time on the farm, so I didn’t have the time to put into that anymore,” Moore said. However, they already had a Facebook page and website for the agritourism business.

“We just took that and expanded on it and just made it basically a place to do social media and virtual education and still get facts out to the people that followed us, just in a different way. It’s just kind of grown from there,” she said. “I can post videos, talk to people directly, and so have that one-on-one connection, even though they weren’t coming out to the farm. They are kind of able to visit us now and be a part of us through our social media.”

Education is key to ensuring that agriculture remains a strong industry, Moore said. Teaching young people the facts about agriculture is an investment into educated consumers who understand what farmers do and why, she said. Knowledgeable consumers are essential to creating opportunities for future farmers, including her own four children, she added.

“We just want to make sure that is still viable and a good career choice for them, and that we’re able to transition the farm over to them like it was to my husband,” she said.

Moore grew up near Logan and spent most of her weekends and summers on her grandparents’ farm at South Prairie. In high school, she was active in FFA and the vocational agriculture department, developing her speaking skills and learning to work with different types of animals.

After graduating from Minot High School in 1995, she attended community college in Bottineau to obtain her associate’s degree in fish and wildlife management. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in plant and animal biology from Minot State University in 2000. During her time at MSU, she worked at Roosevelt Park Zoo, gaining experience with animals and doing educational activities with children.

She moved to Wisconsin and worked as lead feeder on a large dairy farm for a couple of years. When an opportunity came to work in swine production, she thought that would be a fun and interesting change.

“I ended up really enjoying it, and I stayed in the swine industry for about 10 years. That’s how I got back to North Dakota. They started doing some different startup facilities,” she said.

She worked for a small company near Breckenridge, Minnesota, and Gwinner and eventually moved to Cando. She helped start the swine barn at Edmore before returning to Cando and taking a job with the Towner County Soil Conservation District. She worked with farmers and the public there for about 10 years.

In 2019, Moore transitioned into full-time farming after she and her husband decided to switch up their careers. Jason Moore still is engaged on the farm but also works full-time for a trucking company. In addition to managing day-to-day farm operations, Carie Moore works for a local rancher and began homeschooling one of their children after seeing the benefit of one-on-one home instruction during COVID-19 distance learning.

With the changes in her home and professional life, Moore has sought out other outlets to interact with producers and the public and stay involved in education.

One outlet has taken her into classrooms across the country. For about the past three years, she has worked through an organization called Nepris, which connects industry professionals to classrooms.

“I do a lot of class visits virtually all over the United States. I’m able to talk to quite a large age group and different varieties of students about agriculture,” she said.

Moore also represents Towner County on the North Dakota Soybean Council and is active in her county and state Farm Bureau. She creates a weekly video blog for the Farm Bureau called “On Your Table.”

Moore works with her local 4-H and shooting sports programs. She has been involved with North Dakota Agri-Women and American Agri-Women, serving as a recent state president and national vice president of communications.

“If something is important to you, get out there and volunteer for it. Local leadership is very, very important to me and to our small community. If you want your small rural communities to grow and to thrive, you need to be active in them and have some kind of voice, whether you sit on the school board or one of the county co-ops. No matter what you do, that’s going to impact your community in the future and for your kids as well. So anytime I can volunteer for something that’s going to make a positive difference for our state or our community, I try to get involved somehow,” she said.

As a woman in agriculture, Moore said she’s appreciated the support of teachers, employers and co-workers and others who have helped her get where she is. In most instances, she’s worked with men, but she doesn’t see agriculture as an uncommon career path for a woman.

“For as long as North Dakota has been around and people have settled here, women have always been involved in ag and played a vital role in it. Even if it came from raising chickens and selling eggs in town, or milking cows and selling the milk or making butter,” she said. “Even though that’s where it started, these women were very, very active on the farm from the beginning of statehood, and it has just progressed all across the nation as well.”

There’s always been an awareness of the contributions of women to agriculture, but it is becoming more acknowledged, she said.

What drew her to agriculture was a love for the outdoors and animals, along with a desire to be busy, because there’s never a lack of work on the farm, she said.

“There’s always something to do better or to learn. We do a lot of research here with cover crops on our farm, so I just enjoy something new every day, learning something new. Then I really enjoy just sitting in a tractor sometimes, listening to podcasts and music and not having any interruptions, just having a glass cab all around me and being able to see everything – all the land around us, what people are growing and doing,” she said. “I pretty much just love everything about it.”

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