Nichole Neubauer

Nichole Neubauer, BAA (Hon), is a farmer and educator who has dedicated her career to creating opportunities for young Albertans to engage with agriculture in meaningful ways. Through hands-on initiatives such as the Growing Minds program based out of Neubauer Farms and the Agriculture Discovery Centre (ADC) located at Irvine School, she has shared her passion for farming with tens of thousands of young people.

Nichole Meridith Alice Neubauer was born on June 1, 1973, in Medicine Hat, and grew up on a family farm operated by her father, William, and her mother, Linda. She cherished the rhythms of farm life – caring for animals, tending to gardens and riding horses – and quickly developed a deep appreciation for agriculture. “We had a few cows,” she recalls, “so calving season in the spring was always a highlight. If there was a cow in labour, even if it was a school night, we would get to come out and watch and sometimes even participate. I think that instilled an appreciation for life and nature at a young age.”

In 1992, she got her first taste of public life when she was named Medicine Hat Exhibition and Stampede Princess. It was much more than a ceremonial title: her duties included attending fundraisers, engaging with prominent Albertans, giving inspiring talks to kids and serving as an ambassador for the Western way of life. Her experiences at events like the Calgary Stampede only reinforced her connection to her farm roots and her belief in the importance of celebrating rural culture.

Nichole has always loved horses and as a teenager offered riding lessons to children on her family farm, an experience that led her to study early childhood education at Medicine Hat College. Over the next 15 years, she held various roles at schools, preschools and daycare centres throughout Medicine Hat, developing programming, advocating for children with special needs and interpreting for deaf students. A seven-year stint as an early intervention therapist with Alberta Health Services began in 2007, a position that overlapped with a two-year term as executive director of the Medicine Hat & District Childcare Association.

In her work, she observed that many students spent most of their days in sanitized institutional environments. In hopes of broadening their learning experiences, she contacted a close friend who was a kindergarten teacher and invited her to bring her students to Neubauer Farms for a day of hands-on, developmentally appropriate activities.

The excursion succeeded beyond Nichole’s expectations. Even reluctant kids, who were apprehensive at first, were soon eagerly petting horses, feeding calves, and making what Nichole calls “authentic connections” with the land. Hoping to replicate the experience on a larger scale, she collaborated with educators to design structured farm tours aligned with curriculum standards. Before long, Neubauer Farms was welcoming 3,000 students annually to its Growing Minds program, offering a diverse array of activities and immersive community classrooms that fostered deep learning.

“When these kids hear the word ‘farm,’” she says, “we want it to elicit a positive experience. We want them to make the connection between the fresh, brand-new eggs they’ve gathered on the farm and the eggs they eat at home. We hope they remember caring for an animal, which builds empathy, which is such an important aspect of childhood development.”

Soon, Neubauer Farms had reached capacity, with upwards of 22,000 kids having visited the farm since 2005. But when the COVID pandemic disrupted in-person learning, Nichole was inspired to innovate once more.

She pitched an ambitious project to Prairie Rose Public Schools to build a 200-by-200-foot working farm, right on Irvine School property. Trusting Nichole’s track record of success, the school division approved the idea, and in the summer of 2021, the Neubauers transformed part of the Irvine School property into a little farm on a prairie playground. Operating from April to October each year, the Agriculture Discovery Centre (ADC) serves as a dynamic hub for agricultural learning, complete with feeder steers, bottle calves, lambs, goats, pigs, laying hens, a market garden, a greenhouse and a vermicomposting system.

Inspired by her experience as a 4-H member, Nichole designed the ADC to be a place where students learn to do, by doing. Students manage daily operations while cultivating leadership development, collaboration opportunities and communication skills. Students are responsible for doing chores when they come to school in the morning and before they head home in the afternoon. They look after feeding and caring for all the animals and plants, maintain and harvest the garden. Each fall, the students organize a community event where they sell the produce from the garden, and a live auction is organized to sell the production livestock. The annual fundraiser involves the entire student body, from the kindergarten students who help decorate for the event to the Grade 9 students who manage ticket sales and prepare the evening’s meal using produce they’ve raised themselves. This event serves as a key fundraiser for the ADC, and all proceeds are reinvested in program growth and opportunities for student learning.

Nichole is concerned about the growing employment gap in the Canadian agriculture industry. In an effort to help address this problem, she partnered with industry experts and professionals across to region to develop specialized Career and Technology Foundation courses. Known as AgPro, these courses for Grades 7 through 9 inspire students to explore careers within the agriculture industry. Currently, Nichole is creating an online AgPro program aimed at making agricultural education accessible to students and teachers across Alberta. She is also collaborating with Medicine Hat College to develop new certificate and diploma programs in agriculture studies.

As her profile grew in the farming community, Nichole’s influence spread beyond her own farm. She served as board member of the Seven Persons Grazing Association and played a pivotal role in establishing the Medicine Hat & District Chamber of Commerce Agriculture Education Task Force, where she tirelessly advocates for new policy highlighting the importance of agriculture education. In 2020, the Alberta Minister of Agriculture appointed her as a founding director of the entity known as Results Driven Agriculture Research.

Meanwhile, the success of her agricultural education programs has made Nichole a sought after speaker for community organizations and for large-scale industry events and conferences. During her speaking engagements, Nichole shares how initiatives like the Agriculture Discovery Centre are an effective way to bridge the gap between rural Albertans and their urban counterparts. “We all need to eat, and conversations around food create unity,” she says. “People might have different preferences, but we can all come to the table and realize that we share more values than differences.”

In 2016, the Neubauers were named the Bank of Montreal Farm Family of the Year for Cypress County. The following year, Neubauer Farms was named the Small Business of the Year by the Medicine Hat and District Chamber of Commerce. Nichole is the 2018 Cypress County Citizen of the Year, the recipient of the 2020 Women in Business Medicine Hat Inspire Award, and the 2023 Prairie Rose Public Schools Community Champion for Education Award. The Medicine Hat News named her the 2023 Newsmaker of the Year. She has received the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta) (2022) and the King Charles III Coronation Medal (2024), and she earned an Honorary Applied Baccalaureate degree from Medicine Hat College in 2024.

Currently, she and her husband Mark are partnering with Prairie Rose Public Schools to oversee project design and program development for the launch of a program for high-school students called the South Alberta School of Agriculture (SASA). They envision SASA as a premier institution that will equip students with the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to excel in the agriculture industry and grow the agriculture workforce of tomorrow. SASA is set to open to students in September 2027.

Nichole is the proud mother of 2. Her son Logan is a commercial pilot, and her daughter Evie is pursuing a career in teaching, but both actively contribute to the family farm, and Nichole is confident that agriculture will always be part of their lives. She is certainly glad it has been part of hers.

“I'm very, very thankful for the life that I get to live,” Nichole says. “I like to say it's a life that inspires me to rise with purpose each morning, ready to share my journey and forge meaningful connections. It's all about being able to create something that transcends individual effort and creates a collective impact that is transformative for my community.”