OAK BROOK, Ill. – A college student from Indiana never farmed but the agriculture fruit in her family tree is just now emerging in her studies and future career path.

Clare McGrady is one of 20 Agriculture Scholars recipients this year under an educational program created by Farm Foundation in 2020. The program was established in a partnership with the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

McGrady, who expects to receive her master’s degree in agricultural food and resource economics at Michigan State University this year, said she had doubts on whether she would be among the applicants chosen.

She called her mother after she was notified through email she made the final cut. “I was definitely shocked and I was very excited,” she said.

All of the chosen applicants are graduate students of agricultural economics. They will undergo training under the program in agricultural policy, commodity market analysis, agricultural finance and other farm related fields.

Farm Foundation, based in Oak Brook, is a provider of practical solutions to challenges facing agriculture.

McGrady, 25, grew up in Hillsboro, a community of about 500 residents about 45 miles southwest of Lafayette.

She lived in a home surrounded by roughly 5,000 acres her grandparents – and now her uncles – work to raise corn and soybeans. Her father, Gary, runs a hardware store and just began farming part time with his brothers while her mother, Tina, is editor at the Journal Review newspaper in nearby Crawfordsville.

McGrady is a former 10-year member of 4-H who, unlike other extended family members, never showed cattle. Her favorite 4-H projects were scrapbooking and photography.

She was on the volleyball, softball, tennis and swimming teams at Fountain Central High School, where she was the class of 2016 valedictorian and member of her high school’s FFA chapter.

McGrady went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Texas Christian University, where her father attended in the 1980s. After taking a number of economics classes at TCU, she began to reflect on her roots in agriculture and childhood in a very rural community.

Eventually, McGrady said she decided what she learned about economics would blend well with agriculture and took a detour in her career path to Michigan State University to learn more about both fields in her post undergraduate studies.

One reason she chose MSU is her recently deceased grandparents met as students on the campus. “It was nice for me to spend time here to think back to the 1950s when they were here,” she said.

McGrady recently went to Korea under an internship with the Foreign Agricultural Service under USDA to learn about things like international trade.

She went to East Africa where she discovered regulations governing the transport of farm products in developing countries need improving. She also interned in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal in South Asia where she learned the proper techniques of planting by hand still practiced by farmers, including the family she stayed with during her visit.

“I helped them plant their corn in one of their fields. I was so focused on the spacing and dropping the seeds correctly that they actually had to pull me out of the way of a team of oxen that were plowing,” she said.

McGrady, who’s also employed at MSU as a research analyst, said she wants to work in some capacity for a company or government agency that places helping farmers at the forefront once she completes her studies.

Her research has included interviewing farmers about the challenges they currently face like climate change. McGrady said she envisions her first career to be assisting farmers with findings of her research or through policy making.

“It’s very important to me to work somewhere that really aligns with my morals and my goal to serve farmers because that’s my family. That’s my uncles and my dad. I mean, I have cousins. They’re going to carry the torch on past my uncles,” she said.

Her first learning opportunity this year as a Farm Foundation scholar will be in the form of an upcoming trip to Hawaii where she will meet the other scholars and experts in various fields involving agriculture.

McGrady said the trip will also include visits to farms that grow things like Macadamia nuts coffee.