Written by Derek Mulhern, PCC
As a new professional working in agriculture, I'd never seen someone like me, a gay man, succeed in my world. Today, an organization I've spent the last two years leading is becoming something new, built on the vision that no one else has that experience.
The Cultivating Change Foundation, founded in 2015 to help LGBTQ+ people in food and agriculture feel seen, is now Open Fields Alliance, built to push past belonging in agriculture into building, our careers and our sector that is essential to anyone who eats.
I want to tell you why, and I can't tell that story without telling you my own.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
In 2012, I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in agricultural education and drove a U-Haul to Kansas City to start my first job in the sector. I'd grown up on a dairy farm, in 4-H since I was seven, and an FFA officer. I thought I'd found exactly where I belonged.
What followed was death by a thousand cuts. Farmers asking if I had a girlfriend yet. A manager telling me to remove my earrings, because of what people might think. Colleagues telling me, more than once, "I think being gay is a choice," and me never knowing what to do with that statement. Every industry conference became a calculation of how much of myself could I afford to bring into the room. Piece by piece, I left more of myself behind just to stay.
By 2019, I was on a train home from an industry event that had worn me down completely, and I applied for a job outside agriculture before I'd even reached my stop. I didn't know what waited on the other end. I only knew it had to be different.
Two Lives Become One
It was. Within my first week at my new job in philanthropy, I learned the organization had an LGBTQ+ affinity group, and I met a gay man who'd just won their young professional award. I felt like I was home in a way I hadn't let myself imagine at work.
I assumed I'd left agriculture for good. But in 2023, when I started my own consulting practice, I made a rule: I'd only work with organizations where I could be fully myself. Some were agriculture nonprofits. A year later, when Cultivating Change decided to hire their first executive director, it felt like my two lives — the agriculture professional I'd trained to be, and the openly gay man I'd since become — could finally become one.
The Question That Comes Next
Over these past two years leading Cultivating Change, we've made real progress helping LGBTQ+ people in this sector feel seen. But we kept hearing something else, again and again: once you've felt belonging, you can't go back to needing just visibility. What people started asking us for wasn't more affirmation, it was help becoming leaders, growing their careers, bringing others along behind them.
I think of David, who found Cultivating Change several years into his successful career in agricultural manufacturing. The question for him was no longer, "Do I belong here?" He'd already answered that for himself. The question was, "How far can I go while being fully myself?" What he needed wasn't visibility. He needed leadership development, meaningful connections, and opportunities to influence the industry he cared about. Watching people like David grow from participants into leaders is exactly why Open Fields Alliance exists.
To be clear, visibility and belonging aren't going anywhere. They're the ground everything else grows from, and that will never change. But Cultivating Change was built to answer one question: do I belong here? Open Fields Alliance exists for the question that comes next. Now that I belong, how do I grow? A professional sector that's finally open to you was never meant to be the destination. It's the place you're meant to grow.
Growing. Connecting. Leading.
Growing. Connecting. Leading. That's what this next chapter is built around. Leadership development for people like David who are ready to lead as themselves, not in spite of who they are; a network where LGBTQ+ people across this industry can actually find each other, instead of feeling like the only one in the room; and real pathways into influence, so the next generation doesn't have to choose between visibility and advancement the way I once thought I had to.
We're building something bigger: for the person who's spent decades in this industry and wants to make the path easier for whoever's behind them, the trans student who's never met another trans person in agriculture, and the person newly stepping into management and figuring out how to lead as themselves. And we're for the allies who've been waiting for a clear way to stand with us, because this only goes as far as the people willing to walk it with us.
Finding My Way Back
I think often about myself on that train in 2019, certain only that something had to change. I didn't know that leaving would let me build the life I have now, one I couldn't have pictured back on that dairy farm. Leaving wasn't a failure. It was the only way I found my way back.
To anyone reading this who's standing where I stood then: we see you, and we built this for you.
Learn more or get involved with Open Fields Alliance at openfieldsalliance.org.