Women Find Voice in Agriculture Industry
DES MOINES, IOWA — Laura Krouse owns and runs a 72-acre farm in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Since purchasing the land on the tail-end of the 1980s farm crisis, Krouse has cared for and developed the land into Abbe Hills, a community-supported agriculture farm with 200 participating customers.
Krouse is like many farmers across the United States and in Iowa: she grows corn and hay in addition to the 15 acres of CSA land. Unlike many landowners across the United States and Iowa, however, Laura is a single woman managing the farm largely on her own.
According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, 985,192 women operated farms in the United States as recently as 2007. Women, according to the census, operate 24.8 percent of Iowa farmland, and this does not include women who own but do not work on their land.
While this number shows women establishing a solid niche within agriculture, Krouse says her experiences both working on her farm and as a soil and water commissioner have shown her that the mechanics and dynamics of industry are not gender-blind.
“Women tend to look at whole systems instead of parts,” she said. “Women tend look over the long haul. Women tend to see interactions where men don’t. Women who farm are more interested in long-term use of land for farm families. We look at ecosystem units separately.”
Fundamental Differences
Leigh Adcock, who grew up on a small farm in northwest Iowa, is no stranger to agriculture. She’s also familiar with the gender issues within the industry.
“I wasn’t surprised to find the big numbers of women and the very passionate group of women in market farming—basically, growing food, having livestock, raising food to feed people” instead of livestock, she said.
Adcock worked at the Iowa Farmers Union before joining the Women, Food & Agriculture Network in 2008, where she now serves as the executive director. WFAN’s mission is to link and empower women to build food systems and communities that are healthy, just, sustainable, and promote environmental integrity, according to its website.
“All over world, women are the ones who feed their families; they grow the food,” Adcock said. “In America, our agriculture system has been so skewed by industrialized, male-dominated, commodity-based farming; our place has really been marginalized here.”
WFAN seeks to avoid and reverse that marginalization taking place in America. Headquartered in Iowa, the national nonprofit has maintained strong relationship with other groups around the world with women working on agricultural issues. It boasts over 1,000 women on its e-mail list, but the majority of programming is done in state.
“Women in agriculture, as in other types of careers where they’re in the minority, really benefit from networking, sharing their successes and their challenges, talking things over—and they can do that both electronically and through the events that we sponsor,” Adcock said.
The programming WFAN coordinates is diverse. Adcock lists a monthly e-bulletin and field days as the most common ways to stay connected. But perhaps most notable is WFAN’s “Women Caring for the Land” initiative. Originally started in Linn, Johnson and Jones counties in Iowa, the initiative is based on a learning circles model that requires informal participation rather than sitting and “looking at a guy talking—and usually it is a guy,” explained Adcock.
Women learn about soil and water, then go on trips to apply the information and see, rather than just hear about, a specific topic they’re interested in.
Krouse is a facilitator for “Women Caring for the Land,” although she was initially skeptical when introduced to WFAN by the nonprofit’s founder and close friend, Denise O’Brien.
“Denise had the idea that women who own farmland were not getting conservation services like they should,” she said. “I doubted her; as a soil and water commissioner for 20 years, it never crossed my mind that that they weren’t receiving the same services.”
Since writing the grants and curricula for the initiative, Krouse said she has found what O’Brien said to be true.
“She taught me that women and men do things differently for different reasons, including farm,” she said, “and that my way of doing things has merit and perhaps I could show leadership in my way of doing things.”
The goal of the program, said Krouse, is to make women more confident about asking about and getting what they want from their land.
“‘I didn’t realize it was free,’ ‘I didn’t realize they would come out and help me,’ ‘I didn’t realize my tenant didn’t get to decide that,’ ‘I can write that in my lease?’ Those things started coming up,” Krouse said.
The female farmers attending these programs weren’t the only ones surprised by what they learned. Krouse said that many speakers, often district conservationists, were unaware of this strong but silent niche of women in the agriculture industry.
“(A speaker) would come and he would say, ‘I have never seen these women before in my life. They’ve never come in for service; we’ve never had a way to reach them before. Thank you for getting these women to come out so we could meet them,’” Krouse said.
Kristy Archuleta, an assistant professor in the School of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University, said women are quick to gather for services like this because it’s a support system that may not arise in mixed-gender setting.
“It’s a different venue where women can network, they can relate to others in similar situations, and they need some more faces,” Archuleta said. “Women say ‘I might not be able to get out and socialize with many other people,’ or, ‘There’s not a lot of women in my community that are like me, so this is a place where women are doing the same thing I’m doing and struggling with the same issues I’m dealing with.’ It’s great to have that support system in place.”
The Role of Sustainability
The Women, Food & Agriculture Network—and the programs it offers—is still young. O’Brien and colleagues began the group in 1994 after traveling to Beijing for the United Nation’s Women’s Conference, Adcock said. After taking their ideas on organic agriculture to the conference and meeting other women from around the world, they decided to come back and create a board. Over time, that board became an official organization that focuses, Adcock said, “around the access to programs and land, sustainability issues and women having equal say at the table on policy issues.”
Adcock is the only paid staff member of WFAN. Like many nonprofit directors across the country, she operates as a one-woman show; office work, coordination with the board, public and volunteer outreach, fundraising and grants all fall on her. Adcock, however, has bigger worries.
“I’m concerned that in the United States, we’re degrading not only the environmental quality of the land but also the social fabric of our rural areas,” she explained, “so anything that I can do in my work to create a different kind of agriculture and a different kind of society is real important to me.”
Krouse, a trained agronomist but self-identified agricultural ecologist, agrees that empowering and enabling women is not enough. In 2007, she was awarded the Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture, given by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. She was the first single woman and the first small-market farmer to receive the award. In addition to being an honor, it provided Krouse with some clout on the subject—both with women and within the industry.
“For a long time, people thought I was just a crazy person—a crazy girl,” she said. “And then, ‘Well, maybe she’s not that crazy, ’cause she hasn’t gone broke yet,’ and then, ‘Well, maybe she’s not that crazy, ’cause she’s making a living,’ and then, ‘Well, maybe she’s not that crazy, ’cause she won an award,’ so it makes being able to do what I do more possible.”
While Krouse is optimistic about what has been done thus far, she has concerns about whether conservation efforts are doing enough in the now. Citing the aging population of Iowa, Krouse says the timeliness of the conservation issue is key.
“There are a lot of women involved in agriculture every day working with their families; and there are some like me working alone,” Krouse said. “But there are tons of women who own farmland. And a lot of them are elderly. We have a moment in time here where they are not so elderly; they are in a position to make decisions about their land.”
According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture, the average age of female farmers in Iowa is 55.1 and rising. The most significant numbers are in the 45 to 54 and 55 to 64 age groups.
Adcock says that women who own farmland have been inheriting family farms all over the Midwest whose husbands and fathers have been farming in past years.
“All these women, who may be in their 60s and 70s, may be more concerned with environmental qualities than with making profit in a lot of cases,” Adcock said. “Our worry is that these ladies are aging and that in 10 to 20 years these women will be gone.”
Krouse agreed.
“A culture of conservation in Iowa is clearly diminished over the last four decades,” Krouse said. “These women can remember when it was really strong and I think it’s really time that we reach them. It’s not going to be available forever; they’re going to get older and go away or be unable to make decisions.”
Future of the Movement
The Women, Food & Agriculture Network is making efforts to educate the women of both today and tomorrow. “Women Caring for the Land” is now seeking to train the trainer, Krouse said. What the organizers have figured out is that women respond best to in-person, face-to-face invitations and are most comfortable asking questions of people they know—enabling success in Johnson, Linn and Jones counties, where Krouse is a recognized figure, but encountering hesitancy elsewhere.
Kristy Archuleta, who recently organized the sixth annual Women Managing the Farm conference in Wichita, Kan., said interest for the conference and others like it has yet to wane.
“The energy around the conference hasn’t died. … We’re all willing to work on a central purpose: to help women in agriculture any way we can.”
WFAN is reviving its “Harvesting Our Potential” internship program, which matches women who want to be farmers with women on farms and lets them “experience everything they can during growing season,” Adcock said.
Adcock also said WFAN would like to try bringing young families onto the farm after older women pass away to prevent bringing corporations on.
“It’s an exciting time but it’s pretty important that we act,” Krouse said. “We have the opportunity to empower…to enable women to feel like they can make decisions and have a right to make decisions. They have a right to expect certain things on their farm and that they can get it done the way they want.”
Northern Prairie Chevre in Woodward, Iowa, is owned and operated by three women. Connie Lawrance, Kathy Larson and Wendy Mickle have turned a 4-H project and the inability to fill a dairy tanker into a local business and successful artisan cheese farm.
