An Antigonish, N.S., girl is one of four winners of the 2025 Heritage Fair National Showcase in Ottawa for a project about the role women played on her family’s potato farm in North Lake, P.E.I.

“I was speechless, I couldn’t talk. I called, like, everyone in my family to tell them,” Cora Lukeman, 10, told CBC’s Information Morning in an interview last week.

Her family farm is R.A. Rose and Sons, which was first established in 1873 and passed down through six generations. She started the project— Women in Farming: Rooted in Tradition, Growing the Future —last year, when she was in Grade 4.

Lukeman said she wanted people to learn that women always had a role in farming but they didn’t always get credit. She said women in her family have always been part of the work in the fields, keeping the books and making decisions.

She interviewed her aunt, Keisha Rose Topic — who is the current president of the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture — as well as her grandfather.

She said her grandfather told her women make good farmers because “they’re smart” and “they care about the land.”

Lukeman said one of the most interesting things she learned was that 50 per cent of new farmers in Atlantic Canada are women and a third of all farmers in Canada are women.

Lukeman said the fair was virtual, but that she had some “intense moments” when she was in P.E.I. on vacation waiting to find out the results.

“One night, my parents came home — they were on a date night — and they said they got an email that said I had won,” she said.

She said her aunt Keisha was proud of her because she also made it to the nationals at the heritage fair when she was younger.

Women working behind the scenes

Ellen Lukeman, Cora’s mom, told Information Morning it was “pretty amazing” to see her daughter had won and that she was able to find out in P.E.I.

“I knew her project was amazing and she had worked so hard on it and it was something she was so passionate about it. But the same could be said for all of these amazing young people that had gotten to that point,” Ellen Lukeman said.

Growing up in a farm family, Ellen Lukeman said she’s always known that “women really run the show behind the scenes.”

“I got to see my great-grandmother, or Cora’s great-great grandmother, Bessie and all her role in the farm and then my grandmother Laura. Things wouldn’t have happened without her,” Ellen Lukeman said.

“And also my sister, to take on such a huge role at a young age. She finished university and decided she wanted to come back to the farm. A tough decision to make living in a rural area to go back home and take on a job that we had seen growing up that had a lot of hardships involved with it too.

“The fact that Cora wanted to know more and was questioning what it means to be a woman in agriculture, I was really proud of her even just for asking that question.”

Cora Lukeman said she’s thought about farming as a job, but she hasn’t made her mind up yet.

“I kind of want to be a nurse practitioner like my mom,” she said.

WATCH | Cora Lukeman’s presentation:

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