After 15 years in Nashville, country music singer Hailey Whitters is seeing the payoff of her unique sound and take on “authentic country music.”
Along with her passion for country music, Whitters is known as a “Corn Star”, appropriately named after her love for agriculture and farming. Whitters says that farm fields are her “holy place”, and fittingly, she was even married in a farm field back home in Iowa.
Whitter’s passion for farming and agriculture made her an ideal feature for this week’s “Like a Farmer“, a new podcast hosted by AgAmerica’s Director of Business Development Pat Spinosa, who is also a sixth-generation cattle and citrus farmer.
During the interview, Spinosa digs deep into what it means for Whitters to be an entrepreneur and start a label while continuing to inspire other young women in the industry. You can watch the full interview here.
Part of what motivates Whitters is knowing that everyone back home is getting up and working each day, and they’re farming. Her album covers and song ideas often point back to rural America and farming, but that’s no surprise considering how much of her family is involved in agriculture — including Whitters’ dad farms corn and soybeans.
One of the songs on Whitter’s record, “Middle of America” features some of what she learned about eminent domain.
“I remember driving through western Iowa. It was the first time I learned about eminent domain and saw all of these signs about ‘stop the airport’ and ‘save the farms,’” explained Whitters. “That was the first time that I realized that the government can take farms to build an airport. It kind of blew my mind. That’s in the song, ‘If the state wants an airport, they’re taking the farms’.”
While writing her songs, Whitters says, “I was just painting through the lens of where I grew up.”
An entrepreneur at heart, Whitters says that she owes much of how she grew up to her success. With the goal of building a farm back home in Iowa, Whitters isn’t going to quit singing anytime soon, but watch out world — a pig farm is on the horizon for this country music star.
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