Temra Costa: The Feminine Side of Farming

The evo­lu­tion of the iconic farmer needs one more tweak to get us up to speed, says Temra Costa, author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat (Gibbs Smith, 2010). The farmer needs to be a woman.

The last agri­cul­tural cen­sus showed women-owned farms have increased by 30 per­cent. Additionally, women are the founders and force behind much of today’s sustainable-food leg­is­la­tion and emerg­ing busi­nesses. “We know that women are there, very much involved in food, but for some rea­son those sto­ries weren’t being told,” Costa says.

Sustainable Renaissance

The bur­geon­ing sus­tain­able agri­cul­tural renais­sance has been upon us now for about a decade. Farmers’ mar­kets grew 17 per­cent last year. Small farms are pop­ping up every­where, many offer­ing Community Supported Agriculture mem­ber­ships that quickly sell out each spring. Most cities offer at least one farm-to-table restau­rant. Salad bars are even creep­ing into pub­lic schools, some sup­plied by local farms.

The sung heroes of this move­ment show up in the media fre­quently. People like Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver, Joel Salatin and Mark Bittman share the good news of sus­tain­able ag. But the women often remain in the shadows.

Women such as Elizabeth Henderson of Peacework Organic Farm, who had the courage to take enor­mous risks for change. In 1979 Henderson retired from teach­ing at a uni­ver­sity to start a farm. “I wanted to live in a way that was in con­cert with my beliefs about the envi­ron­ment and com­mu­nity,” she says. Her farm debuted one of the first CSAs 23 years ago.

To do this, Henderson had to break with the val­ues she was taught in the 1950s, “that there is only one true way to do things,” she says. Along the way she encoun­tered many con­de­scend­ing and unpleas­ant men, “but that’s how social change is.”

Women stuck in behind-the-scenes agri­cul­tural roles is noth­ing new, accord­ing to Costa. “Before the Industrial Revolution you had cou­ples who were farm­ing with their chil­dren and their fam­i­lies, and the women wouldn’t call them­selves farm­ers. You still see that today; a woman will say, ‘My hus­band is the farmer and I’m the farmer’s wife.’ It wasn’t until 2002 that the U.S. Census of Agriculture added a place for a sec­ond sig­na­ture to indi­cate more than one farm owner.”

Costa got up close and per­sonal with small farm­ers while work­ing for the non­profit Community Alliance with Family Farmers, in California. Her job entailed vis­it­ing area farms and get­ting to know the farm­ers. “I found myself dri­ving around to dif­fer­ent farms tak­ing pho­tos and writ­ing down the farm­ers’ sto­ries; I felt like Dorothea Lange. Meeting the people—that’s what hooked me,” she says.

Throughout her six and a half years work­ing with CAFF, a thread was con­stant: the large num­ber of women in the sustainable-food move­ment. “It was some­thing that couldn’t be denied. I became intent on help­ing them suc­ceed and con­nect­ing them to the world,” Costa relates. The result was her book Farmer Jane, which pro­files 30 women involved in sus­tain­able food, from farm­ers to leg­is­la­tors and chefs.

Was Costa wor­ried about back­lash from the male-dominated farm­ing and ag com­mu­nity? Nope. “If any­one had a beef with me they could bring it up in a pub­lic forum and we could dis­cuss why women are impor­tant in the move­ment, and why haven’t they been given their due atten­tion?” she states.

Women, a Natural Fit for Farming and Food

Women tend to pos­sess char­ac­ter­is­tics that make them a nat­ural fit for sus­tain­able farm­ing and food pro­duc­tion, observes Costa. “Women are very rela­tion­ship ori­ented, very com­mu­nity based. They’re con­nec­tors and they care about future gen­er­a­tions. Many of them have chil­dren, and that was one of the  things that drew them into the field in the first place—wanting to grow or pro­duce food in a way that wouldn’t com­pro­mise the health of their chil­dren,” she explains.

These skills trans­late to suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing as well. “The women that I know are inter­ac­tive peo­ple and they love to bring their prod­uct to mar­ket; they love to meet the peo­ple and they love to cre­ate that rela­tion­ship,” Costa says.

For Nancy Vail, a farmer at Pie Ranch in Pescadaro, California, it was the rela­tion­ship aspects of CSAs that lured her to farm­ing. CSAs “went beyond the indi­vid­u­al­ism of home­steading and cre­ated a con­text where eaters and pro­duc­ers can be in direct rela­tion­ships,” she says in Farmer Jane.

Community has cer­tainly been a cen­tral part of the suc­cess at Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, California. Opened in 2006, this women-run coop­er­a­tive makes healthy meals with local sus­tain­able meats and veg­eta­bles that are avail­able for deliv­ery or pickup.

Three Stone Hearth runs on what co-owner Jessica Prentice calls feminine-based prin­ci­ples. “The male restau­rant world is often highly com­pet­i­tive, stress­ful and often fairly mis­er­able,” she points out. At Three Stone, col­lab­o­ra­tion and no ego is the name of the game. There’s also a spir­i­tual com­po­nent. “We look at food as a gift and treat it as such, with respect,” she says.

Given women’s com­mon need for com­mu­nity, it’s no sur­prise that when women farm­ers and women in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture have strug­gles, it usu­ally results from lack of community.

According to Leigh Adcock, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, farm­ing women are often iso­lated geo­graph­i­cally because they are in rural areas. They can also face cul­tural iso­la­tion because they are prac­tic­ing an alter­na­tive form of a very tra­di­tional field in a male-dominated trade. “We find that pro­vid­ing even an online forum for these women helps them feel sup­ported,” Adcock says.

The two biggest areas of growth in sus­tain­able farm­ing are women inher­it­ing their farms from their hus­bands and the grow­ing mar­ket for local food. “The small and diver­si­fied farm­ing that’s being demanded by eaters all over the world right now is the per­fect place for a woman to start her own 2-acre, 5-acre or even 250-acre farm,” Costa con­tin­ues. “Women are really into this con­nec­tion between food and com­mu­nity, and it’s some­thing that’s draw­ing them out to start their own operations.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

When Costa talks of women being sus­tain­able farm­ers, she means beyond organic farm­ers. “I’m talk­ing about women in smaller-scale diver­si­fied farm­ing that respects the land and doesn’t com­pro­mise its abil­ity to grow nutri­tious foods. Sustainable farm­ing uses less machin­ery than con­ven­tional farms, and you typ­i­cally see fewer women involved in farms that require more machin­ery. I say that as a gen­er­al­iza­tion. Small, diver­si­fied farms use a lot more hand labor like pick­ing, cut­ting, prun­ing and weed­ing. More women feel they can do that work ver­sus run­ning large machines,” says Costa.

And they’re suc­cess­ful. Women are now the prin­ci­pal oper­a­tors of 14 per­cent of the nation’s 2.2 mil­lion farms—a sea change from 1978, when the fig­ure was 5 per­cent, accord­ing to WFAN. “We’ve found that when women run the farm as their pri­mary source of income, they are suc­cess­ful,” Adcock reports. “They prob­a­bly aren’t pros­per­ing, but they are mak­ing a liv­ing, which is the usual goal.” Sustainable agri­cul­ture also pro­vides many women with part-time work that allows them to raise a family.

Beyond the Fields

Historically men have dom­i­nated in gov­ern­ment agri­cul­tural roles as well as farm­ing. “It is largely still men in gov­ern­ment roles, although women are cer­tainly mak­ing their way, like Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, and Michelle Obama,” says Costa. “I feel that both have made a real impact. Before tak­ing office, Merrigan was a really strong sup­porter of local foods, and it’s almost as if the admin­is­tra­tion was try­ing to give the sustainable-food move­ment a bone. They had put in Vilsack as Secretary, who had very strong con­ven­tional farm ties, and it’s almost as if they wanted the Deputy Secretary as a bal­ance to this.”

Farmer Jane includes pro­files of sev­eral women in government-related roles, such as Glenda Humiston, Director of Rural Development for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “I feel she has kept up with a lot of her community-based work that dif­fer­en­ti­ates her from other can­di­dates,” Costa says. “She pio­neered land poli­cies that have engaged a broad range of stakeholders—no small feat—and con­tin­ues to listen.”

Humiston has found that being a woman in what is often a man’s world has not posed too much dif­fi­culty. “I have done a wide vari­ety of jobs through­out my career that would tra­di­tion­ally be called ‘men’s’ work. Although there was the occa­sional misog­y­nist, most peo­ple were more inter­ested in the qual­ity of my work than my gen­der. Some of that had to do with my real­iza­tion early on that women did have to pro­duce very high qual­ity work in those fields while also reach­ing out in appro­pri­ate ways to social­ize and net­work.” Humiston is find­ing more women are involved in or pas­sion­ate about envi­ron­men­tal land issues and farm­ing. “In many ways I think women are bet­ter at see­ing how envi­ron­men­tal and farm­ing issues tie into food and fam­ily. Making those con­nec­tions is vital if we are to develop good pol­icy on agri­cul­ture, food safety, health­care and related issues,” she says.

In addi­tion to work­ing the land, women are mak­ing inroads fight­ing against issues such as GMOs. Claire Hope Cummings, author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon, 2008), is a lawyer, has been a farmer, and is an anti-GMO advocate.

GMOs are inher­ently a women’s issue,  remarks Cummings. “Because of both the way they are made, which inter­feres with the  repro­duc­tive process of seeds, and the fact that they are patented forms of life, GMOs put a pri­mary part of the food system—seeds—into the hands of pri­vate corporations.

“And since women feed the world (almost 85 per­cent of farm­ers in Africa and Southeast Asia are women) and all women care about feed­ing their fam­i­lies, they should be con­cerned that we no longer have con­trol over our food sys­tem,” Cummings asserts.

She points out that men are the ones pri­mar­ily behind the cre­ation of GMOs. “I don’t think a woman would ever give a name like Terminator to a life-giving source,” she says, refer­ring to the Monsanto seed of that name.

Farming Forward

Although bud­get cuts could hurt some of the inroads women have made in sus­tain­able farm­ing and lead­er­ship roles, Costa feels con­fi­dent. “I think it’s always been the case that these pro­grams are in peril. Look at how much our gov­ern­ment has been sup­port­ing pro­grams that are based on con­ven­tional crop pro­duc­tion ver­sus sus­tain­able organic food pro­duc­tion. There were a lot of great fund­ing streams that were added to the last farm bill, and they are being threat­ened with cuts right now because of the econ­omy. So it’s a very chal­leng­ing time in keep­ing the inter­est alive in the sustainable-food sys­tem in the coun­try,” she says.

Costa hopes her book inspires peo­ple to get more involved in com­mu­nity as well. “I think we are all crav­ing more inter­ac­tion these days, and I wanted to pro­vide the infor­ma­tion so that read­ers can make choices to inter­act more with peo­ple via food. If you look at our pop­u­la­tion that’s involved in farm­ing, it’s 2 per­cent, whereas before the Industrial Revolution it was 60 per­cent. So you had more peo­ple con­nected to the land back then.”

Costa believes that food is a pow­er­ful vehi­cle to address the eco­nomic and social dis­par­i­ties and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion now occur­ring. “Food offers solu­tions that don’t have to cost a lot of money,” she con­cludes. “If you can spend a lit­tle bit of time every day learn­ing how to work with it, to grow it, we could all eat more health­fully and be health­ier peo­ple in this country.”

Currently Costa is work­ing on her next book, ten­ta­tively titled Farmer Jane’s Kitchen.

To learn more about Farmer Janes across the coun­try and to view links to orga­ni­za­tions mak­ing a pos­i­tive change, visit www.farmerjane.org.