Blazing Trails for Women in Agriculture
Dr. Tammy Gray-Steele is the first American agricultural specialist, agripreneur, educator, and women and children advocate. Born and raised on a farm, she received her secondary education in the rustic and rural community of Wewoka, Oklahoma. Upon graduating high school, Dr. Steele left Oklahoma to pursue a dual educational and business career in New York City. Armed with the legal degree she obtained from New York University Law School, and the requisite legal business experience she acquired on Manhattan’s Wall Street, she returned home to her family farm, and started to give back to the Oklahoma rural communities, in the process working full-time in the Oklahoma Corporate legal arena, and devoting time to study for a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA), Horticulture and Childcare Development Certifications.
On the broader national turf, Dr. Steele is a former USDA-SARE Advisory Main Council Member. Additionally, she had the rare honor of being appointed by President Barack Obama’s administration as a distinguished USDA-NASS Advisory Councilwoman, serve on USDA Grant Panels and a USDA Strategic Action Team Leader. Dr. Steele serves on various scholarship committees that were instituted for the educational empowerment of the youth. In addition, she offers invaluable support to the Oklahoma City Black Chamber of Commerce, apart from volunteering on various rural Chamber of Commerce boards.
Deploying uncommon intellectual energy and superlative personal industry to achieve exemplary and duly-acknowledged results-oriented performance in both individual and team activities, Dr. Steele has demonstrated unrivaled commitment in assisting counties in the State of Oklahoma with expert knowledge in healthy food production at a level that matches any known empirical and international standards. In the process, she has managed to build for herself an unassailable reputation, and a formidable pedigree, as a widely-sought after agricultural expert who is never short of strategic, innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to challenges in the agricultural sector of the economy.
Dr. Steele has embarked upon a personal crusade to develop good character amongst women and children. With a total belief in the credo that, “A child can only be developed if her mother provides sufficient support and resources,” and with a legendary passion for empowering disadvantaged women and women of color in rural America, she strives to ensure that no woman, and no child, with whom she comes into contact, is socially and economically marginalized in the scheme of things.
Sincerely motivated by an altruistic desire to empower the socially and economically disadvantaged, and to deliver timely awareness and education to those who truly desire a sustainably healthier lifestyle, Dr. Steele established National Women In Agriculture Association in 2008. Since then, she has employed the powerful and influential instrumentality of NWIAA to pursue her agenda of sustainable development in America’s agricultural sector. To this end, in January 2014, Dr. Steele opened NWIAA’s first Sustainable Agriculture Academy in the United States, located on the Eastside of the Oklahoma City Metro Area, and in close proximity to the city’s largest African American population. It was in the light of this that Dr. Steele was recognized at the White House in February 2014, for leading the country in efforts to save and educate America’s youth using environmental and innovative agriculture-based sustainable best practices, and in the spring of 2013, she was awarded a humanitarian honorary doctorate for exemplary performance as one of the most influential agro-business community developers amongst her generation in the United States.
Dr. Steele has received awards from Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma Conservation District Cooperatives Department and Oklahoma Legislative Black Caucus, and Tuskegee University and other educational institutions in genuine appreciation for her support of various economic empowerment entrepreneurship programs. She has written testimonial articles with New York Magazine and other Agriculture Journals. She can be reached at: womeninag@gmail.com or (405) 424-4623 for speaking engagements, and for teaching sustainable business techniques that can rapidly develop communities.
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