“Sometimes I’m a flashlight farmer.” Alyssa Clements says this with a smile and a certain pride. The image of her working late into the night captures both the everyday demands on her time right now and a more general truth about how she moves through the world. Working a full-time job while also running a cattle operation and raising a young son with her husband, Adam Boucher (BS food and agricultural business ’14), is par for the course for Clements, who has made a habit of saying “yes” to every opportunity.
Clements grew up in Clay County, two generations removed from the family’s century farm. Her parents both work in healthcare—her father, Barton Clements (BA biology ’82, MD ’86), is a surgeon, her mother, Lee Clements, a registered nurse—but they recognized early on that their daughter wasn’t going to follow them into medicine.
Clements remembers her parents being practical—and encouraging—about what came next. “They knew I wanted to be an ag kid,” she says, “and they said, ‘Well, we need to go where the experts are to help her figure out what she wants to do.’”
That path led to 4-H, under the guidance of now retired UT Extension Clay County director and agent Randall Kimes, followed by a steady stream of livestock shows and speaking competitions. She eventually made her way to UT, where she threw herself into campus life with the same zeal, serving as a college ambassador, interning in the Office of Development, and competing nationally on the livestock judging team.
Today, Clements is a sales specialist with Purina Animal Nutrition, working with the Tennessee Farmers Cooperative’s joint venture, ProTrition, throughout Middle and West Tennessee. Most days are spent making calls to farms, large and small—pulling hay samples, advising cattle and horse producers on nutrition and mineral decisions, and helping them fine-tune operations. She’s also taken on management responsibilities, mentoring a team of young salespeople.
Recently, Clements’s advocacy work attracted national attention. In January, she represented Tennessee at the American Farm Bureau’s Excellence in Agriculture competition in Anaheim, California, where she placed second to a woman she’s known for a decade—“The ag world is very small!” Clements says. The Excellence in Agriculture program champions advocates like Clements, who receive less than 50 percent of their annual income from farming. At the competition, she prioritized three key risks facing Tennessee farmers: rural healthcare access, legislative threats to crop protectant products, and the accelerating loss of farmland. “The rural healthcare issue is especially personal,” she notes, as Clay County no longer has a hospital.
This all makes for some long days, but Clements seems to thrive on the challenge. “That’s my motto in life: I’m fueled by farmers to help the industry, whatever it might be.”
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