Underrepresented Communities in Agriculture in the US

Clare grows her own blueberries. Then she picks them, washes them, sorts them, and takes them to town to sell at the local farmer’s market. If she has any left, she sells them on the side of the road, out of the back of her truck. At home she also manages the livestock: lambs, horses, rabbits and dogs.

Clare identifies herself as a farmer, but is pretty sure that if she engaged in a more traditional, productivist form of agriculture, she would be hard-pressed to find anyone else who would identify her as such.

According to a study (from where I have lifted Clare’s story) by Amy Trauger, Professor of Geography at UGA , Clare is in the minority in multiple dimensions. Firstly, as a woman principal farm operator, she joins a cohort of only 306,000 others, a mere fraction of the overall farming community. But even within that community, Clare is in the minority. Most women in agriculture, even if they perform the same duties as their male counterparts, refuse to self-identify as farmers. The vision of the farmer as a big, strong and tough male is so strongly imbued in collective consciousness that most women farmers are not willing to transgress gender lines, regardless of the duties they perform. In fact, the US Census of Agriculture did not even include gender as an operator characteristic until 1978!

As a minority sub-population in agriculture, there are statistically significant differences in the sorts of farming women engage in. Another one of Trauger’s studies, this time on women farmers in Minnesota, shows that women tend to engage in smaller-scale agriculture (most farms are less than 50 acres), earn less than their male counterparts (<$25,000 annually), grow in locations where the soil is less productive, disproportionately focus on producing fruits, vegetables, trees, nuts, animal products, and engage in more labor-intensive farming. Moreover, women are up to three times more likely to operate farms that run on sustainable agricultural models rather than on productivist agricultural models.

This shift away from what Vandana Shiva calls the “masculinization of agriculture” brings up some important feminist quandaries. First: why do women farmers tend to practice a different, more sustainable form of agriculture? Is it because of institutionalized patriarchal structures that, for example, make it much more difficult for women farmers to access capital and loans than their male counterparts? Is it because, as children growing up, farmgirls are not given the same responsibilities as their male siblings, thus being shut out from essential farming knowledge and experience? Or is there something about the female experience that shapes their relationship with the land in a particular way? Ecofeminists, for example, believe, that women have a special relationship with the earth, having both suffered similar forms of male oppression.

What’s clear is that women suffer a crisis of legitimacy when they enter the farming profession. The bias against them that is institutionalized, and women have had to come up with creative ways around it. Trauger’s subjects, for example, navigate male-dominated social spaces (for example: the feed mills, equipment dealerships, hay auctions, sale barns, farm shows, etc.) by pretending that they’re out on a farm errand for their husbands, or taking a male companion along to do their negotiations for them. Most women in US agriculture today still do not feel comfortable publicly transgressing institutionalized gender lines.

So what’s a feminist to do? On the one hand, I like the fact that women are engaged in sustainable forms of agriculture. I’m not thrilled that it tends to be low-income generating. So here’s the big question: Is small-scale, but sustainable farming women farmers’ niche, or are they forced into it by institutionalized sexism? Is it an equal opportunity haven, or the only alternative women have? This is an empirical question, and one I’d like to see more data on–what do women farmers actually want? Are they satisfied engaging in small-scale agriculture, or do they dream of owning large-scale, industrialized farms?

Regardless of the answer, a couple of things need to happen. Firstly, more agricultural Extension agents need to be women. Research shows that women Extension agents are more likely to be attuned to the specific needs to female farmers, and more likely to prepare education programming specifically for women farmers. Secondly, active efforts to reduce institutionalized barriers against women in agriculture must be made. These include increased access to capital, loans and training for women farmer. Finally, there needs to be greater recognition of the contribution of women to agriculture, not as farmwives who support their husbands, but as primary operators in their own rights.

The number of farms operated by women is growing every year, while the number of farms operated by men is falling, and societal expectations need to catch up with the trends.