I grew up on a fruit farm in Ceres. Long before I understood market access, IP enforcement, or breeding cycles, I understood the rhythm of a place where the work is real but rarely written about. Where the women who shaped the harvest, worked in the pack house, the office, also shaped the home, the table, the next generation — and almost never the headline. The women in the kitchen feeding the men who got the credit.
And that is the truth I have spent a career circling:
Women in agriculture have a visibility problem.
Not a talent problem. Not a capability problem. A visibility problem.
We are in the fields. We are in the labs. We are in the boardrooms, the breeding programs, the export operations, the cold chains, the policy rooms. We are running businesses, raising families, holding the line on quality, building the global supply of food itself. And still — the industry looks at itself in the mirror and sees men.
And this week, I want to talk about the only thing I have ever seen actually solve it. Because inside every visibility problem is a gap where opportunity quietly waits.
Find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. You are going to outcompete them because you are going to do it effortlessly. To you, it is art, it is joy, it is flow.
Read that again, slowly.
You escape competition through authenticity.
Here is why this matters so much for women in our industry. The reason so many of us stay invisible is not because we lack achievement. It is because we have been quietly taught to perform a version of leadership we inherited — usually from men, usually borrowed, usually a size too big or a shape too small.
We make ourselves smaller to fit rooms that were not built for us. We make ourselves louder to be heard in rooms that should already be listening. We make ourselves generic — and then wonder why no one can see us. You cannot be seen while you are still impersonating someone else.
Visibility starts the moment authenticity does.
Naval Ravikant calls it productizing yourself. The ability to really understand and observe in yourself what you want to do naturally. Look at the things you did as a kid. What are the things you were naturally drawn to? What are the things you do in your spare time? What's the 10 percent of your job that you really love and find yourself doing more than you should?
You should aspire to be a unique combination of authentic traits performed to excellence. Those are the careers you are going to enjoy and the products that are going to end up being unique.
I think about the 10-year-old version of myself on that farm in Ceres. Walking the orchards. Asking my father questions he could not always answer. The things I was drawn to then are the same things I am drawn to now: building, connecting, seeing what others do not yet see, refusing to live small. The authenticity was always there. The career simply grew up around it.
This is what I want to say to you reading this:
The version of you that already knows what you are here to do — she has been there since you were ten. She is not a distraction from your career. She is your career, trying to tell you the truth. A unique combination of authentic traits performed to excellence — that is what makes you impossible to overlook.
But none of this lands without one final ingredient.
Courage is every virtue at its highest form. You can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to act on them when it's difficult, when everything else is going against them, they have no form.
Authenticity without courage is just a thought. Courage without authenticity is just performance.
The women I admire most in this industry have learned to hold both — the inward knowing and the outward willingness to act on it when the room is not ready, when the market is not ready, when even they are not quite ready.
So this week, I want to leave you with three questions worth sitting with. Not skimming. Sitting with.
What did you love doing when you were ten, that you have quietly stopped giving yourself permission to do?
What is the 10% of your work that feels like play to you — that looks like work to everyone else?
Where is courage the only thing standing between who you are and who you are meant to become?
Your answers are not small. You escape competition through authenticity. You build legacy through courage. You bloom where you are planted — and then you make the soil itself richer for the next woman who plants there.
With love, Christina
Founder, herloom bloom where you are planted
Forward this to a woman in agriculture — or any woman becoming who she was meant to be — who needs to hear that her authenticity is not a liability. It is her advantage.
One more thing —
herloom is being built in real time, and it is being built with you, not just for you.
If something in this letter stirred you, challenged you, or made you feel seen — I would love to hear from you. Reach out to me directly at [email protected]
Tell me:
What you are wrestling with in your work or leadership right now
A subject you wish someone would write about — but no one is
A woman in agriculture whose story deserves to be told
An idea, a question, a knot you cannot quite untie
Or simply hello — I read every message myself
This platform grows when women contribute their voices, not only consume mine. Your insights shape what I write next. Your questions become the conversations the industry has been waiting to have. Your stories become the legacy we are building together.
herloom is not a megaphone. It is a table. And there is a seat at it for you.