Deanna Kovar’s childhood playground spanned 800 acres of farmland. Apple and cherry trees blossomed in the spring. Grapes ripened in the fall. And come winter, her father constructed massive snowmen using a front loader from their family’s third-generation dairy farm, which fronted Interstate 94 connecting Chicago and Milwaukee.
“My dad and my uncle farmed together and milked between 70 and 100 cows [on leased and owned acres],” Kovar says. “As kids, we had chores to do, but we never had to milk cows early in the morning. That was a huge opportunity for us to be kids and take part as students and athletes.”
It wasn’t until the University of Wisconsin that Kovar fully embraced her farm upbringing. She wasn’t planning to study anything related to farming, but Land O’ Lakes awarded her a scholarship dependent upon an ag-related degree.
“I started an ag business degree, thinking I could always move to the business school. No harm, no foul,” she says. “The reason I’m in agriculture today is because of the experience I had on the ag campus, which is a small little island in the middle of a giant university. I found my home. I found my people.”
Other farm kids from the Association of Women in Agriculture welcomed her with open arms. Those formative years led her toward a career in ag tech, which she began in 1999. Today, she’s one of the presidents of John Deere’s worldwide agriculture and turf division.
As a woman in a male-dominated field, Kovar is acutely aware of the gender disparity that exists within the broader tech sector. Globally, women comprise about 35% of the tech workforce.
“We foster opportunities for women at Deere as much as we can within our company,” she says. At the 2022 Commodity Classic, for example, Kovar invited seven women active in farming to join them on the show floor. “One of the things I noticed at Commodity Classic was that there weren’t that many women on the floor. So, we cultivated and curated a program for booth tours to help them build camaraderie.”
Best and brightest
In some ways, ag tech is more insulated from gender bias than other areas of tech. Being a farm kid is an equalizer.
“I grew up on a farm. I grew up in a man’s world as a girl, and I had to do many of the same things as my brothers,” Kovar says. “In my career, some of the toughest challenges came when I got outside the walls of John Deere.”
Early in her career, Kovar says she sometimes had to work harder than male colleagues to gain customers’ respect and trust. Now that she’s in a position of leadership, Kovar aims to bring more women into ag tech.
“We have some tough problems and challenges to solve in agriculture. How do we make ourselves more sustainable? How do we make ourselves more productive knowing that land is shrinking and labor is tough to come by?” she asks. “It’s all about making sure that we can bring the best and the brightest people to the table. That’s why I think it’s important that we don’t exclude. We need to make sure we engage all people in solving these really, really tough challenges that impact everybody on the planet.”