Grow Further is quickly gaining strength. We’re doing something that’s never been done before: mobilizing private donations to support research and development benefiting smallholder farmers. We’re succeeding thanks to the dedicated individuals who contribute to our mission at every step of this process.

In a nod to Women’s History Month last March, we’re paying tribute to women of Grow Further.

The women behind our work share our common goal: better food security through support of smallholder farmers. We’re gaining so much from their contributions, so we’re overjoyed to learn that the women we work with say they’re benefiting as much as we are. Three of Grow Further’s women partners took the time to share with us their experiences and what it means for them to be a part of our unprecedented journey.

A dynamic trio

Originally from Canada, Dr. Kathleen Hefferon is a professor in the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering program at Cornell University. She’s also an entrepreneur, Grow Further donor member, and our newest board member, having graciously accepted our invitation to join the board last Monday.

Kathleen is one of our first Grow Further donor members, and she’s an increasingly active part of our ourganization. Her work with Grow Further is both a way for her to make a difference and to further educate herself. “I always like to learn, and getting involved with a new philanthropy is a good way to learn in general,” Kathleen says.

PhD student Sakile Kudita is a research fellow and Zimbabwe country manager at HarvestPlus. She’s also one of the principal investigators on our Zimbabwe project. She told us that, for her, she has a very specific objective in mind: chasing innovations that promise to transform farming in her native Zimbabwe.

“I hope to raise the profile and public interest in pearl millet and other neglected and underutilized crops, for the sake of improved household resilience, crop biodiversity conservation, and nutrition,” Sakile says.

Like Kathleen, Dr. Casey Bradley is also an entrepreneur.

The founder and President of Animistic, an animal nutrition company, Casey says she chose to join forces with Grow Further as a donor member out of a desire to do more. “I realized a long time ago I could not do it all by myself,” she explains. “There is only so much I can do for global food security and solving problems.”

From the village, the suburbs, and the rural Midwest

Casey, Sakile, and Kathleen come from very different backgrounds, yet their journeys led them all to the agricultural sciences.

Sakile was born Sakile Nsingo, later changing her last name after marriage. She grew up in Dewe, a village in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland South Province bordering Botswana and South Africa. Her mother was a teacher, and her father ran a grocery store business.

Sakile said farming was a central part of life growing up in southern Zimbabwe. “Farming was a significant part of our livelihoods and our main source of food,” she says.

Kathleen grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolis and the fourth-largest city in North America. Her mother was a public health nurse while her father taught environmental law at a university. “Both were socially conscious people who inspired me to take on global inequity issues,” she said.

Casey came of age in a rural corner of southwestern Michigan. She says she was surrounded by farms and farming through childhood.

“I grew up in a time with a lot of smallholder farmers and still service these farmers today,” she says. “As any small business, the needs are not terribly different: access to capital, access to markets, access to affordable labor, and inputs.”

Pursuing science

Kathleen earned her PhD in microbiology at the University of Toronto and later took a postdoc opportunity at Cornell University in New York. “I have largely remained at Cornell since then,” she says. “I am currently a faculty member at Cornell and teach two large microbiology classes.”

At Cornell, Kathleen mainly researches plant technologies and molecular farming. She also occasionally teaches courses at the University of Toronto as a visiting professor.

Sakile has a bachelor’s degree and an MBA, and is currently working on her doctorate with Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She told us that she originally wanted to study medicine, but at the time there weren’t enough slots in Zimbabwe’s medical schools. “I was not selected for what I wanted, but instead, I was offered a place to study crop science,” she says.

Sakile is now at HarvestPlus. “My research spans across three research areas: namely food technology, microbial ecology, and food microbiology,” she says.

Casey completed her undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. After graduation she immediately joined the agricultural workforce, landing a job at New Fashion Pork. She soon realized that she needed further training in agricultural sciences if she was ever to get to the next level of her career.

“I realized I did not have enough training to solve the problems we faced in animal agriculture and decided to look at going back to graduate school,” Casey told us. “Then I was blessed to receive a full-time position with the University of Arkansas.” There, she worked as a research manager while earning her MS and PhD.

All three women said they took an early interest in food security.

“It does not take much to see the lack of food security, even in first-world countries,” Casey says. “I was born to be a farmer and feel it is my responsibility to help feed the world.”

For Sakile, the fight for food security is personal.

“We were ourselves food secure, thanks to the fact that my parents had some off-farm income, but many people in our village were not; they often came home either asking for food or asking for small jobs in exchange for food,” she recalls. “When I studied agriculture, my mind was always busy trying to figure out how what I had learnt would transform agriculture for smallholder farmers in my country and beyond so that they could be at least food secure.”

Kathleen says she is motivated to act on food security in part by past work she conducted in Botswana.  “I received funding to travel to rural Botswana and interact with smallholder farmers there.”

Kathleen said her time in Botswana was eye-opening and life-changing. “It was really quite interesting,” she says. “Crops were sorghum, I also saw some maize and watermelon. No industrial farming, of course, just small family farms in sandy soil. Livestock included chickens, goats, and cattle.”

In those days, Kathleen could tell Botswana’s smallholder farmers were living a precarious existence. “It is hard to grow much, and their rainy season is shorter and shorter every year,” she says. “I felt quite worried for people.”

Innovating for the future, discovering Grow Further

These three remarkable women may come from different backgrounds and hold vastly different experiences, but all three hold something in common: they are all innovators.

After years of teaching and researching at Cornell, Kathleen founded Forte Protein in 2020. Her company focuses on molecular farming. “This technology that I developed can address protein and micronutrient deficiencies for various populaces while getting away from the need for animal-sourced food,” she says.

Casey has enjoyed a storied career in the global feed industry. After earning her PhD, she went to work for Kalmbach Feeds “and learned everything about the feed industry,” she says. Casey also worked at AB Vista and DSM Nutritional Products before founding Animistic, which does business as The Sunswine Group, also in 2020.

Casey says she could’ve never launched her own enterprise were it not for the expertise she gained in the corporate world. “While working for international companies, I was blessed to see the global challenges of our world and industry.”

Sakile’s career took her to CIMMYT, the international maize and wheat research center founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and later the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, or ICRISAT. Her experiences at ICRISAT led her to HarvestPlus, a major nonprofit that specializes in biofortification, the process of endowing crops with higher concentrations of valuable nutrients and minerals.

Like other researchers, Sakile had a brilliant idea for improving farmers’ lives, but she was having trouble finding the funds necessary to help turn her vision into reality. That led her to Grow Further.

“I got the call for proposals from a former colleague,” Sakile says, referring to Grow Further’s most recent call to researchers for grant applications. “When I read through it, the ideas of what we could do with the opportunity came to mind. I asked myself if they could fund work on pearl millet, especially iron-biofortified pearl millet.”

Grow Further found Kathleen and reached out to her to see if she would be interested in aiding our mission. Luckily, Kathleen was then looking for ways to contribute to global food security, something that would build upon her work at the private venture she founded.

“I found that there was an alignment of missions between my company, Forte Protein, and Grow Further,” Kathleen says. “I wanted the company to have a role in philanthropy, and Grow Further, with its bottom-up philosophy of helping farmers, looked like just the right next step for Forte.”

Casey interviewed our founder for a podcast and also contributes through her company.

“I needed to find a partner to help in this mission,” Casey told us. “My goal for 2025 and beyond for my company is to donate 10% of my revenue to different organizations tackling food security…Grow Further will be one of those missions I support.”

Now serving on our board, Kathleen has long been actively engaged in our work. She participated in a panel we organized in Des Moines at the Borlaug Dialogue, the global food security conference where the World Food Prize is awarded. For her part, Kathleen says she welcomes the opportunities that Grow Further has created for individuals like her to contribute to food security.

“I have been frustrated with trying to find ways to help others through the limitations of academia,” Kathleen says. “That is the main reason why I started Forte Protein. I would like to develop new skillsets to reach my goal of enabling others to achieve food security.”

Making the most of a Grow Further grant, Sakile is using her skills to develop biofortified, drought-resistant, iron-rich pearl millet designed to grow in Zimbabwe’s semi-arid climate. She and her colleagues say they are grateful for the support of Grow Further.

“I hope that we can get high-yielding, iron and zinc-dense varieties released in the country,” Sakile says. “I hope that we can get seeds of the released varieties to farmers’ fields as soon as possible.

Likewise, Casey says she’s in this fight for better food security for the long haul.

“I was born to be a farmer and feel it is my responsibility to help feed the world,” she says. “Food security is essential for peace, growth, and innovation in the human society.”

“I cannot pinpoint when I became interested in food security,” she adds. “Like I said, I was born to be a farmer, to make an impact. 

— Grow Further

Photo credit: Kathleen Hefferon (left), courtesy of the same; Casey Bradley (center), from Animistic’s website; and Sakile Kudita (right), courtesy of HarvestPlus.