True to Her Roots

EmmaRose Strohl’s first job was a little sweeter than most. 

“Growing up, we always had Emma and Grace’s Country Honey,” Strohl remembers of her childhood on a hobby farm with her sister. “We didn’t sell a lot of honey. We mostly gave it away.” 

The goal was not profit, but experience. The family would spread out on their front porch—harvesting honey is a messy job—to cut off combs, spin the extractor, open the spigot for honey to flow out, and, of course, taste-test a bit along the way. “Obviously, you can’t process honey without eating some of it,” Strohl says. “It was such a cool visible and tangible end product to the work we had done with our animals.” 

Her childhood jobs after that all involved agriculture work—from throwing hay to driving horses. “I was always on a farm of some kind or with animals of some kind,” she says. Her father, a 4-H leader, involved her in the organization from an early age, starting with apiary and moving on to showing horses. 

“4-H was just really great for community service, and public speaking and leadership. So the fact that that comes naturally to me now in my career, I credit back to 4-H,” Strohl says. “I don’t think there’s anything that I credit now in my adult life that I can’t look back and say the foundation was built back then.”

That foundation helps her thrive as a food and agribusiness attorney at Barley Snyder, where she assists clients with matters involving food processing, manufacturing and distribution. 

“I never wanted to do something that didn’t talk about animals on a daily basis.” —EmmaRose Strohl

Law wasn’t originally the plan; unsurprisingly, working around animals always was. “I never wanted to do something that didn’t talk about animals on a daily basis, at the very least,” Strohl says. 

So, at Delaware Valley University, she majored in animal science, livestock science and management, with an eye on becoming a veterinarian. As she was preparing for vet school, several of her family’s horses were injured. “Horses, you look at them the wrong way, and they’re broken,” she says. So Strohl commuted back and forth from Delaware Valley University to manage those injuries. She learned she could handle it, but she also realized she didn’t want to do it for the rest of her life. 

After a stint at a cow-calf operation in Canada, she considered going full cowboy, but figured her parents would appreciate her using her degree. “I was still looking for something that benefited the industry a little bit more, kind of beyond my own little place in it,” she says. After seeing news articles about big lawsuits filed against agriculture companies, she found it. 

That background is invaluable now. She knows the vernacular her clients use and how their businesses operate. “Someone that is processing chickens doesn’t have to explain to me why chickens have to be vaccinated before they’re placed in houses,” she says. “We already think in that world, we think with that language, we think with those implications in everything we do. And I have recognized, even in working with my colleagues that don’t do food and agriculture work or come from that background, that that type of thinking isn’t ubiquitous.”

Early in her career, Strohl found herself going toe-to-toe with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. She was representing a client that was producing a product governed by antiquated milk sanitation regulations. “They were applying these old regulations very strictly against my client, causing a significant amount of additional expense,” she says, which would have led her client to reduce or cease production. Strohl went directly to the Department of Ag and provided enough information to show that changing the enforcement procedures wouldn’t risk the safety of the food supply.

Strohl’s favorite part of the job is visiting her clients on-site, seeing their processing plants, dairy farms, chicken houses and food manufacturing facilities. “I really get to see the diversity of agriculture, especially here in Pennsylvania, which is just a super cool microenvironment of what agriculture looks like in the country,” she says. “Walking through a grocery store and knowing that I supported the companies getting that particular item on the shelf is just so rewarding.”

Strohl still gets plenty of animal time on her farm in Berks County, where she raises horses and, yes, honeybees. She’s passing on the lessons, and love, she learned as a child to her own daughter. “I am a second-generation horse girl raising a third-generation horse girl,” she says. “Very, very true to my roots.”