Feminism on the Farm

And so it is that WFAN is work­ing to empower this cru­cial minor­ity. WFAN exists with a mis­sion “to link and empower women to build food sys­tems and com­mu­ni­ties that are healthy, just, sus­tain­able, and that pro­mote envi­ron­men­tal integrity.” As tes­ta­ment to its need, Adcock has seen mem­ber­ship and bud­get in the orga­ni­za­tion dou­ble every year for the last three years.

In addi­tion to assis­tance, women farm­ers seem to have a par­tic­u­lar need for con­nec­tion. “I believe there’s a great need for women to net­work with each other, to sup­port each other both emo­tion­ally and with infor­ma­tion,” Adcock said. “We tend to form a com­mu­nity as a gen­der, whereas per­haps it could be said that men don’t have so much need for this. So although there are many men who are cer­tainly engaged in won­der­ful sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture all around the country—and sup­port­ing the women who are doing that kind of agriculture—we still hear from women every year who say they need a safe space of their own, for women only, to talk about the issues that mat­ter to them.”

A Personal Connection

Having spent much of her life in agri­cul­ture, with the last ten of those years in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, Adcock is well aware of the many cru­cial issues involved in doing this kind of work. “I am a farmer’s daugh­ter; I grew up in north­west Iowa on a con­ven­tional corn and soy­bean farm with a few beef cat­tle,” Adcock related. “I went to school for com­mu­ni­ca­tions but always have had some con­nec­tion with envi­ron­men­tal issues. I’ve done a lot of vol­un­teer work with var­i­ous envi­ron­men­tal groups all my life. I’ve been the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Women, Food & Agriculture Network since 2008, and before that worked for five years for the Iowa Farmers Union. So I’ve been work­ing in sus­tain­able ag for close to ten years now.

“I’m a fem­i­nist and I’m inter­ested in healthy food and farm­ing, so it’s a per­fect com­bi­na­tion for me. This is unabashedly a fem­i­nist orga­ni­za­tion. We’re all about empow­er­ing women to take lead­er­ship posi­tions in their com­mu­ni­ties, to the extent that they’re inter­ested in reach­ing the goals that they have. In our case, those goals include healthy food and farm­ing. I have a deep love for the envi­ron­ment, for healthy food and farm­ing, and for empow­er­ing women in all aspects of their lives.”

Concern for Food

Adcock has found that women, because of their unique cares and con­cerns, are espe­cially drawn to non­chem­i­cal agri­cul­ture. “The thing that seems to bring most women into this move­ment, though, is a con­cern for food,” Adcock con­tin­ued. “We see child­hood dis­eases sky­rock­et­ing, and almost all of them are diet related. We see dis­eases sky­rock­et­ing among adults as well. Women just hap­pen to be the ones con­cerned with feed­ing their fam­i­lies, and they also are con­cerned about feed­ing their com­mu­ni­ties. The more they get inter­ested in healthy food, the more they want to pro­vide healthy food to every­one. Another issue for a lot of our mem­bers is access—to ensure that every­one, no mat­ter what their income level or where they hap­pen to live, has access to healthy food.”

Outreach and Assistance

As part of its work, WFAN reaches out to begin­ning women farm­ers through a pro­gram called Harvesting Our Potential. “We get a lot of calls from young women in particular—but some­times from middle-aged women look­ing at a career change—who are really inter­ested in rais­ing and sell­ing food and would like to get train­ing and access to land. We’re work­ing to develop them. We want them to cre­ate com­mu­nity as a prac­tice with one another—talk to each other and sup­port each other. So the linch­pin of that pro­gram is con­nect­ing these young or begin­ning women farm­ers with exist­ing women farm­ers who are will­ing to men­tor them.

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“We’ve just actu­ally received a $400,000 begin­ning farmer and rancher devel­op­ment grant for this pro­gram. The excit­ing thing about it is that it’s not only going to allow us to con­sis­tently build these cohorts of young women and men­tors through­out the next three years, but we’re also plan­ning to offer train­ing to the men­tors, which is some­thing that has been lack­ing. We’re going to bring the women farm­ers who are host­ing the aspir­ing and begin­ning farm­ers in for classes every win­ter and teach them how to be bet­ter mentors.”

Another exam­ple of WFAN’s work is a pro­gram called Caring for the Land, which addresses par­tic­u­larly vital issues directly with women who own farm­land but don’t know how to have it worked sus­tain­ably. “Probably the most ground­break­ing thing we’re doing right now is work­ing with women who are landown­ers in the Midwest, who in turn are work­ing with ten­ant farm­ers. A lot of them inher­ited farm­land, for exam­ple. They have very strong con­ser­va­tion goals, but not hav­ing man­aged land before, they have no idea how to trans­late those goals into action. They don’t know what the pro­grams are, where the money comes from, and prob­a­bly most impor­tantly, they’re not sure how to talk to the ten­ant farm­ers about these issues. They don’t feel like they have the lan­guage or the knowl­edge. So we’ve been bring­ing them together for the last four years, hav­ing them talk about their chal­lenges and goals for their farm­land, and then pro­vid­ing them with resources on how to reach those goals.”

Riding the Wave

Given WFAN’s unprece­dented growth, Adcock is work­ing hard to keep the orga­ni­za­tion on course to do the great­est pos­si­ble good. “We’re sort of rid­ing this wave right now,” Adcock con­cluded. “We’ve grown expo­nen­tially and are basi­cally try­ing to man­age our growth in a smart way. We want to con­tinue to stick to our mis­sion and make sure we don’t expand so quickly that we can’t be effec­tive. But we’re get­ting a lot of atten­tion from agen­cies, from the USDA, and from non­profit foun­da­tions. Overall, it’s a really great time to be work­ing with women in agri­cul­ture of any kind, but in par­tic­u­lar sus­tain­able agriculture.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.wfan.org.