By MEGGIE I. FOSTER
Associate Editor 

GREENFIELD, Ind. — While many folks may be quite familiar with the successful BRAVO reality series The Real Housewives of New York or Orange County, there is a new group of women stirring serious buzz – not on the television screen, but across the social media community. They call themselves The Real Farmwives of America and Friends (RFOA).

Not at all associated with the BRAVO network, The Real Farmwives of America and Friends, similarly to The Real Housewives series, chronicle the lives of real women who live, work and raise families in the agriculture industry.
According to Cris Goode, of Monrovia, Ind., a member of the group who helped facilitate three women in an ag blogging workshop hosted by the Indiana Soybean Alliance (ISA) last year, “These women are farm girls, farm wives, moms, daughters and aunts that either live on the farm, grew up on the farm or work with farmers every day. Most importantly, they are friends that have the bond of the farm, among other things.”

Members of the group share stories, recipes, money-saving tips and craft, decorating, remodeling, landscaping and gardening tips, as well as use their individual blogs to tell the story of agriculture in a more personal setting. The Farmwives, comprised of more than 20 gals from Indiana, Ohio, Iowa and even North Dakota, post content and updates through individual member blogs that are then linked to a joint Facebook at www.facebook.com/therealfarmwivesofamerica and Twitter account under the name @realfarmwives and also at www.realfarmwivesofamerica.com
Founder and facilitator of the group Heather Hill, of Greenfield, Ind. – who blogs about balancing a busy lifestyle raising three young children, operating a hog and grain farm with her family and working full-time off the farm – said “blogging is a great way to connect with other moms and help them understand better what we do on the farm.

“Everything that I do is for the benefit of my children, that if they choose someday to stay in agriculture, that opportunity will be available for them here,” she added.

Hill, an active member of the agricultural community in Indiana, works in sales for Pfizer Animal Health, serves on the Indiana Pork Board of Directors and blogs over at 3 Kids and Lots of Pigs, found at www.3kidsandlotsofpigs.blogspot.com

She said the RFOA group was born from a blogging workshop she attended in April 2010, sponsored by the ISA.

“When I first started blogging, I wanted to find the how, what and why people would care about farming,” Hill explained. “I needed to find the balance of the farm versus other stuff (recipes, stories about her children and the like).
“So, I started out doing farm-related posts every Friday, called Farmer Friday. I just decided to one day a week focus on the farm. I found it gave me a voice and a place for it to fit into my blog.”

Every quarter the women from the blogging workshop meet up for brown bag luncheons to discuss ways to amplify their presence on the blogosphere and opportunities to work together on future projects.

“During one of the brown bag luncheons, we all started talking about ways of tying our group in together,” Hill said. “We decided to do a joint post quarterly – this is how the Real Farmwives of America and Friends was born.”
Examples of previous RFOA quarterly posts that began last September include: “How did I get here?” “Holidays on the Farm” and “The Cycle of Life.” In addition, a member of RFOA guest blogs on Hill’s 3 Kids and Lots of Pigs blog every second Friday of the month.

The name, in case you were wondering, was in fact inspired by the BRAVO reality television series. “Cris and I did some brainstorming; we knew we needed a name. We’d both seen different parts of the series,” Hill said, adding that like on the show, the women of RFOA are more than just wives – “we are also friends.

“The BRAVO series has been the inspiration for our name and the photo. Many people ask me if they know that we exist. If they do, then we are certainly doing something right.”

Since its creation in the fall of 2010, the group has launched a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account and a website at www.realfarmwivesofamerica.com

Partnership with Gooseberry Patch for recipe testing

Additionally, this April, RFOA announced a new partnership with bestseller cookbook publisher Gooseberry Patch to cook a total of 180 recipes. Each week, a new gal from RFOA will be featured and asked to cook 10 recipes from a Gooseberry Patch book selected by readers over the course of a three-month period. At the end of three months, the featured Farmwife will giveaway a second copy of the cookbook to her readers.

A total of 18 RFOA women are involved in the project and a total of 36 cookbooks will be provided by Gooseberry Patch.

“We are so excited to partner with Gooseberry Patch on this project,” said Hill. “For a company of this caliber to believe in us and take a gamble on us like this is incredible.”

The project will be chronicled on www.realfarmwivesofamerica.com and recipes will be posted on the individual blogs of the women in the group. According to Goode and Hill, the partnership with Gooseberry Patch will serve as a great tool to communicate with the non-farm audience.

“Early on we found that online tools work very effectively to communicate with non-farm women,” said Goode, who worked with Leah Beyer of the ISA to create a series of workshops to teach women in agriculture how to blog. “Statistics show that the online community is predominately composed of women. In fact, there is a huge audience of women bloggers, particularly mommy bloggers.

“And, since most farm communication programs target men, we felt that working with women was an untapped audience. There are dynamic women in Indiana that could tell their farm story better than anyone else. It was a powerful peer-to-peer opportunity.”

According to Megan Kuhn, communications director for ISA, the blogging workshops were the brainchild of Goode and Beyer, who were inspired by The Pioneer Woman – Ree Drummond. Drummond blogs about life on a cattle ranch raising a family of four at www.pioneerwoman.com

She is also the best-selling author of The Pioneer Woman Cook, Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl and The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels – A Love Story.

“Leah was online and Googled a recipe finding The Pioneer Woman’s site,” said Goode. “She quickly noticed how women were flocking to this website and how powerful this one woman in ag was.”

At that time, Goode started her Goodeness Gracious blog and later, Beyer started her blog, Beyer Beware.

“I fell in love with the Pioneer Woman,” Goode said. “I found we had a lot in common. And I saw this could be a powerful tool to talk about agriculture with other women … not ag all the time though; also, children, recipes in the kitchen, funny stories about our husbands, just like we’re chatting over coffee at the kitchen table.”