By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University/Image: Jean Goslin
Let’s go to inner city New York, where a teacher is using rooftop gardens to help her students learn about seeds and plants and other growing things.
Among the teaching aids she is using are playing cards developed by a national group of women who are advocating for agriculture. This group includes a woman from rural Kansas, and the group is having its national meeting in Kansas City in fall 2025.
Jean Goslin is president of Kansas Agri-Women, an organization that focuses on agricultural education, advocacy, and professional and leadership development. Goslin grew up on a farm near Manhattan.
“Mom and Dad dairied and raised feeder pigs,” she said. She went to Manhattan High and attended Kansas State University.
Her aunts were involved in a women’s farm group that would become known as Kansas Agri-Women. That organization was founded in 1974.
Jean married Gene Goslin. In 2011, they moved near Dwight where they farm today. Dwight is a rural community of 217 people. Now, that’s rural.
The Goslins have three grown children, a son Keith and daughters Jerilyn and Danielle. Jean got involved in Kansas Agri-Women, the state level affiliate of American Agri-Women. She has now served two stints as American Agri-Women’s national vice president of education.
“Our motto is ‘From Producer to Consumer with Understanding,’” Goslin said. “We need to tell people our story.”
Kansas Agri-Women’s most visible project has been the roadside signs depicting a grocery bag with the message, “One Kansas Farmer feeds more than 155 people + You!”
While serving as national vice president of education, Goslin was in an AAW committee meeting where they were brainstorming ideas for additional fun ways to inform the public.
“Somebody had seen some customized playing cards,” Goslin said. “They told me to run with it.”
Goslin and her team developed a deck of playing cards with the AAW logo and agricultural facts on each card. “We have facts on there about everything from potatoes to corn to cattle to almonds,” she said.
Those cards are now among the materials that AAW distributes to help build knowledge about agriculture. For example, these have been provided to teachers who participate in the Ag in the Classroom program.
“I really enjoyed being able to represent AAW at the national FFA convention,” Goslin said. “When you talk to those kids, you come away thinking that we’re going to be okay because of the high quality of the youth who are coming up.”
Today, American Agri-Women is the nation’s largest coalition of farm, ranch, and agribusiness women with more than 20 affiliates and members in 42 states. In November 2025, the national convention of AAW will be held in Kansas City.
“We last hosted a national convention in Wichita in 2011,” Goslin said. “We’re excited that it will be in Kansas City, and Kansas Agri-Women will be helping.”
In addition to business meetings, the group will tour the new American Royal facilities and present an award to the Peterson Farm Brothers for their outstanding agricultural outreach. “We hope more Kansas women will join us,” Goslin said.
“I love the national AAW convention,” Goslin said. “I’ve never gone to a convention where I didn’t learn something new about a different kind of agriculture.”
She enjoys the diversity of farm products and the camaraderie of the women. “We might have a different oar in the water but we’re all going in the same direction,” she said.
Goslin adds: “We’ve been able to make national connections. We have friends from Maine to California.”
For more information, see www.americanagriwomen.org.
Goslin was handing out the agricultural playing cards at an Ag in the Classroom conference where she asked teachers how they will use them. One teacher said she was using these materials as a teacher in inner-city New York, helping her students learn about horticulture using urban rooftop gardens.
We commend Jean Goslin and all the volunteers of American Agri-Women for making a difference with their advocacy and education. We can learn a lot about agriculture if we play our cards right.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at https://www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
