Judge switched careers to become a full-time farmer with her husband before pivoting to work as a farm manager and rural appraiser. In the 1980s, a farm crisis in Iowa forced Judge to mediate between farmers and lenders in order to help farmers keep their operations, and that's when she took an interest in politics. Judge won her first state Senate seat in 1992 and went on to serve as lieutenant governor of Iowa from 2007 to 2011 under Chet Culver. In the Vilsack administration, from 1999 to 2007, she was the state's secretary of agriculture and the first woman to hold that position. Judge and her husband have owned a cow-calf farm in southern Iowa for more than 40 years.