An advocate for animal welfare and autism awareness, Dr. Temple Grandin shared her inspirational life story during “Women Powering Agriculture” festivities at the Pennsylvania Farm Show on Thursday, Jan. 9.
Grandin, who is autistic, is a world-renowned designer of livestock-handling facilities and a champion for diversity, especially for people on the autism spectrum.
Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture secretary Russell Redding said during introductory remarks that her life story is inspirational.
“She was diagnosed at a time when the world had little understanding of the condition,” Redding said. “Dr. Grandin faced challenges many of us can never imagine. Instead of letting those challenges define her, she embraced them, drawing from her unique perspective to revolutionize the livestock industry.”
Grandin’s keynote address highlighted her innovative work in agriculture, her autism and how diverse thinking benefits America economically.
Being a woman, she said, was harder than being autistic.
“When I started out in the cattle industry in the 1970s, I’ll tell you that being a woman was a much bigger barrier than autism ever was,” said Grandin to the capacity crowd during her 45-minute speech in the Small Arena. “Where I had most of my problems was with foremen and middle management.”
The HBO movie “Temple Grandin” examines her life through graduate school and her fight to be employed in a male-dominated industry. The movie depicts a scene that Grandin said actually happened because of her gender.
“There’s a scene in the movie where they put bull testicles on my vehicle,” said Grandin, who desired from a young age to have a career working with animals. “That actually happened.”
Grandin persisted through those trying times because she had the ability to see what she calls doors of opportunity. She referenced another scene where she asks and gets the business card of the editor of an agriculture publication, which was a door of opportunity that helped lead to her ag career.
“I knew if I wrote for the magazine, it would help my career,” said Grandin. “They (farmers) were much more accepting (of women) in journalism, so I started writing for the Arizona Farmer Rancher magazine.”
As a visual thinker, she said she’s able to visualize problems that need solutions. Grandin said she could “see” why cattle were needlessly dying while being handled prior to processing.
Today, almost half of North America’s cattle are handled in a center track restrainer system she designed for meat plants to address cattle mortality rates.
Her biography notes that, “curved chute and race systems she designed for cattle are used worldwide, and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many people reduce stress on their animals during handling.”
“I’ve done a lot of things,” said Grandin, who earlier noted when she was young people thought she was stupid instead of autistic. “I designed all of the cattle handling equipment for every cattle plant in North America. I think that’s doing pretty good for somebody they thought was stupid.”
Also needed in America are people who have the talent but not the trained skills and know-how to build things. She stated that machinery used in new buildings for the poultry and pork industries most likely come imported from Holland instead of the United States.
“That goes back to taking out shop classes,” said Grandin. “I understand that you still have those here in Pennsylvania. There are other states, though, that don’t have them.”
Grandin noted that the inability of our nation to build and repair machinery has a direct connection to autism. She added that many visual thinkers are autistic or have some other disability.
“A lot of these visual thinkers are autistic,” said Grandin. “I am going to guess that 20 percent of the people I work with who build big things are either autistic, dyslexic or ADHD. If kids aren’t exposed to building things, how are they going to get interested in building things? We’re not doing enough to develop skills.”
In calling herself an author who is “a shameless book seller,” which elicited audience laughter, Grandin said Amazon is releasing her latest book titled “Visual Thinker,” which focuses on different kinds of thinkers.
“There are three basic ways that people think,” said Grandin. “And when you get someone who is autistic or dyslexic, you’ll either get an extreme thinker or an extreme mathematician and their different ways of thinking.”
Grandin noted her autistic mind takes “small pictures of things that interest her” and noted that when she was young she thought everyone visualized the same way.
“One of the first things I did with cattle behavior is that I got down in the chutes to see what the cattle were seeing,” she said. “They stop at shadows. They stop at reflections. They stop when they see a vehicle parked along the side of a facility.”
People who are diagnosed as object-visual thinkers are good with animals, mechanical things, the arts and photography. “So arts and mechanics tend to go together, so when I was a kid my ability at art was always encouraged.”
Another form of thinking is visual-spatial.
“This is your math/pattern thinker, super good at math, super good at thinking in pictures,” said Grandin. “Math and music tend to go together. One of the problems I had in getting a degree in veterinarian medicine was that I couldn’t do the math requirements, so I majored in psychology.”
Diverse ways of thinking are needed and must work together for the betterment of society.
“You need both kinds of thinkers to build something like a food-processing plant,” said Grandin. “We’re losing out on what I call clever engineers.”
Another career accomplishment is the scoring system for evaluating meat-packing plants. Grandin noted she has published five journal articles on this topic.
“I developed a very simple scoring system … for evaluating a meat-packing plant,” said Grandin. “You have to figure out what are the simple things to measure, what are the critical controls.”
Today, Grandin teaches courses on livestock behavior and facility design at Colorado State University and consults with the livestock industry on facility design, livestock handling, and animal welfare.
In August 2024 she published an article on congestive heart failure and lameness in cattle.
“This is something that 10 or 15 years ago that would have never crossed my mind as a problem,” said Grandin. “We got the slaughterhouses working really great, but now we’re bringing in crippled heart patients.”
She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Franklin Pierce College and her master’s in Animal Science at Arizona State University. She earned a Ph.D in Animal Science from the University of Illinois in 1989.
Other research areas are cattle temperament, environmental enrichment for pigs, reducing dark cutters and bruises, bull fertility, training procedures, horse perception of novel objects, and effective stunning methods for cattle and pigs at meat plants. She also consulted with local poultry producer Bell & Evans on their chicken processing methods.
Following her address, Grandin did a fireside chat to answer audience questions and then signed autographs and took photos with her fans during a 90-minute session. Following that session, she spoke with LebTown about her work with Bell & Evans in an exclusive interview. In the afternoon, Grandin planned to tour the 109th edition of the Pennsylvania Farm Show, which concluded on Saturday, Jan. 11.
During the fireside chat, she encouraged Pennsylvania’s agricultural youth to open their own doors of opportunities to have many experiences within the agriculture profession.
LebTown spoke with sisters Crystal and Chloe Bomgardner of Jonestown to get their opinions on Grandin’s presentation.
“One of the things she said early, actually, in the presentation was to find the doors of opportunity and take the opportunities that you have to make yourself a better person,” said Chloe, who is taking a gap year from college as president of the Pennsylvania FFA chapter. “That really resonated with me. … This past year I’ve found quite a few different opportunities that I feel like, in and out of the (FFA) jacket, I can take to the ag industry and then use to build myself and build others as well, to use my experiences to help build up others.”
Crystal appreciated Grandin being an agricultural industry trailblazer.
“She’s very knowledgeable and kind of paved the way and forged that path to bring great change to the agricultural industry and also to help make it more sustainable,” said Crystal, who is serving this year on the junior committee of the Pennsylvania Farm Show. “There were also really super important topics that are for agriculture, so it was really cool to be here today to see her.”
Watch Temple Grandin’s speech at the Farm Show
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