The Midwest Farmers Daughter: In Search of an American Icon

Chapter Twelve: Female Farmers

231 An October 2010 issue of Farm World led with some Farmer Janeworthy news: the growth in agriculture programs around the country was coming not from men, but from women. From 2005 to 2009, said Bill Richardson, the project manager of the USDA’s Food and Agricultural Education Information System, the number of women in food science had increased 33 percent, and the number in animal science had shot up 25 percent. At Iowa State University the number of women enrollees in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences nearly equaled men at an institution where, overall, males once outnumbered females nearly seven to three. “From 1987 to 2000, the increase we saw was primarily from women,” Tom Polito, director of student services for the university’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, told Farm World’s Michelle Mihaljevich. “They’re involved across the board.” At Purdue University, the number of female students in the College of Agriculture actually outpaced the number of men. Chapter TWELVE FEMALE FARMERS CHAPTER TWELVE 232 “Over half of young people I meet now through the Stone Barns Center are women,” Fred Kirschenmann tells me when I call to get his reaction to the news. A Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and a president at New York’s Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Kirschenmann is blessed with an unusually panoramic view of agriculture. Of the new farmers counted in the most recent Census of Agriculture, 30 percent, he points out, are women. Kirschenmann is a third-generation farmer as well as a scholar, and his long, thoughtful silences remind of my farming grandfather’s. He’s farm people, Kirschenmann is, his German grandfather having tilled the Volga River bottomlands in Russia before immigrating to Lincoln, Nebraska, in the late 1800s. His family has been farming since 1930 in Stutsman County, North Dakota, where his parents arrived in time for the Dust Bowl, an event whose lasting trauma still saturates the ethos of his clan. “My dad’s near obsession of preventing our land from blowing away was ingrained into me as a child,” Kirschenmann writes in an essay published in Caretakers of Creation. “As I grew older, he passed on to me his sense of wonder for the miracle of the soil’s productivity, as well as a profound sense of responsibility to care for it.” In2000 Kirschenmannturnedoverdailyoperationsofhisfamily’s3,500acre certified organic farm to become the director of the Leopold Center, and, as professor of religion and philosophy at Iowa State, to reflect on agriculturalethics .AspresidentofKirschenmannFamilyFarms,he’sexperienced the highs and lows of rural life with his sister, a Midwest farmer’s daughter and decision-making partner. From his vantage he’s seen in four generations of Dakotan farmers’ daughters (grandmother, mother, sister, and now daughter) how women serve as unheralded determiners of the health and welfare of rural places. His mother worked in the fields every day in the growing season, he tells me, adding, “I still sometimes wonder how she managed to do all the preservation of the food, all of the cooking, and still work out in the field virtually every day while managing to garden at the same time.” Growing up in Windsor, North Dakota, Fred’s sister, like many farmers ’ daughters, left the farm to work in the nearest big city at the age of 19, landing a job at the Bell telephone company and later settling down in Fargo. “My sister was more expected to be a supportive laborer on the 233 FEMALE FARMERS farm. . . . I think she to some extent still resents that a little bit. Obviously there was a little sexism involved. Women were not regarded somehow as important in a farming operation as the males were,” Kirschenmann recalls . He describes his own daughter, a fourth-generation Midwest farmer’s daughter, as an “amazing individual” who left the homestead to earn a degree in dance therapy and now runs her own company helping to answer strategy questions for nonprofits. “She’s totally committed to organic agricultural principles,” he enthuses of his daughter, an avid gardener, “which she believes is part of the future. She’s been extremely supportive in that sense. Often she’s given her own time and effort to help think through issues and do feasibility studies and those sorts of things. But she also has never seen herself as being an active manager of the farm...