Claire Ross: How a French teacher bridges the gap between education and agriculture

This is part of a series of profiles highlighting participants in our women in the egg industry program, a unique mutual mentorship program that brings together women egg farmers from across Canada to build leadership skills and facilitate knowledge transfer.

Claire Ross

Moorefield, Ontario

Claire Ross has always known how to bridge worlds. In the classroom, she’s inspiring curiosity in her French immersion and Core French students. On the family farm in Moorefield, Ontario, she’s a hands-on egg, cash crop and turkey farmer, overseeing flocks, barns, and the next generation of young farmers. Whether she’s teaching grammar or gathering eggs, her mission is the same: To help young people understand where their food comes from.

That philosophy was what led her to hatch chicks in her classroom. It wasn’t a lesson in vocabulary, but in life, responsibility and connection. When the chicks finally hatched, the students’ excitement reminded her why she became both a teacher and a farmer.

“I’ve always believed in connecting kids to agriculture,” Claire says. “When they see a chick break out of an egg right in front of them, it changes the way they understand food.”

Claire was the first in her family to graduate university, earning degrees in both French and a Bachelor of Education. Yet, even as she has built a thriving career over the past 15 years teaching grades three through six, the pull of the farm never left her. Weekends, evenings and summers were spent back home helping her parents, uncles and brothers keep Ross Enterprises Ltd. running.

Today, she’s come full circle—working alongside her family to raise hens in enriched colony housing, overseeing a new barn construction project and championing sustainability practices like solar power. With her husband, Ryan, she’s raising the fifth generation on the farm: Roz and Carson, who are already learning the rhythms of farm life.

Her influence reaches well beyond the barn. Claire serves as a Zone 7 councillor with Egg Farmers of Ontario and is a proud graduate of the Women in Food and Agriculture Mentorship Program. She also represented Ontario in Egg Farmers of Canada’s national young farmer program, speaking at national meetings in both English and French. “Being bilingual has been such an asset,” she says. “It lets me connect with producers across the country.”

This year, she added another title: Participant in the women in the egg industry program—a transformative experience, she says. “My mentor has such a wealth of experience, from compliance to succession planning, and it’s been incredible to learn from her. The best part is building relationships across provinces, seeing how other farms operate and realizing we’re stronger when we learn from one another.”

Her mother, Joyce, remains one of her biggest inspirations. “She has farmed full time for decades and continues to hold the farm together as its steady backbone,” Claire says. Watching her mother manage the operation with dedication and resilience instilled in Claire the values of hard work, perseverance and leadership.

It’s a legacy Claire hopes to pass down. “I want our daughter and our nieces to see leadership as something that looks like them,” she says. “More women in boardrooms, policy roles and visible leadership positions—that’s the future I want them to grow up believing in.”

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