October 26, 2019 • 44 mins
Being a farmer's wife used to be the pinnacle role for women in agriculture, but that's changing fast. In this classic episode, learn how more women are reclaiming land and running farms, becoming seen as the rising gatekeepers of sustainable food production.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff
I've never told reproduction of iHeart Radios? How stuff? First?
Did you do not like my rendition of that one?
Was that supposed to be hay go off my outcast?
Maybe a little fly? It was an interesting bake. I
(00:30):
have just spent four days in Dothan, Alabama, which hilariously
randomly is where my mom is from. So I used
to go there two to three times a year until
I was fourteen or fifteen, for you know, holidays and
stuff to visit my grandparents and my aunts and uncles.
But this was for a peanut conference, right, I mean
my peanut butter before you leave. By the way, I
(00:51):
have cases of it, gifted es with cases. They're very nice.
But anyway, the classic we're bringing to you today is
about farmers and specifically women, right, farmers and um, this
is something I learned a lot about at this peanut conference.
I could tell you so much about peanuts. I've learned
so much. I guess you're not allergic to it. Oh no,
(01:15):
Buttter is probably my favorite food. It's also my dog's
favorite foods. So there you go. Yeah, I feel like
for those of us Um, I don't know. Did you
ever have any experience farming? I grew up in La j, Georgia,
which does have farming, so it was poultry and a
lot more beef, so we had cow farms as well
as a lot of chicken farms, so not so much
(01:36):
like garden gardens. We don't have too much of that,
although I did live around a lot of orchards because
we are the apple capital of Georgia, not the US
of Georgia, so I did grow up a lot around that,
but not technically. I don't think I'm new too many
farmer farmers outright, like vegetable farmers. Sure, I didn't have
(01:58):
much experience with it. My school did have a four
each branch. Oh yeah, we did, to my elementary school
and middle school. But we also had a big f
a yeah brand Future Farmers of America. Yeah, so okay,
I guess that's the same thing. And I it's something
that I'm really passionate about because as as most of
(02:18):
you probably know, I do show on food podcast on
food called Savor, and I had the show without me.
Oh no, how dare you? It's just finding out now, um,
but being aware of where our food comes from and
the people behind that food and how did it get
to where you are, and appreciating the labor behind it
because and I think we are moving more towards that.
(02:40):
But for a while, we were very separate, at least
here in America from our food. It was just something
a commodity and you didn't think about. All you really
cared about was how much it costs. And I was
in that too, But on this trip I felt I
was really happy to be able to talk with farmers
UM and here from them and right now we're in
(03:01):
the middle of a pretty serious drought in Georgia most
of the South and just to see how it impacts everybody,
and UM, just hearing from them firsthand. And also a
lot of the people I spoke to UM, some of
them women actually, mostly the Women Love podcast which they
listen while they're doing things around the farm. Yeah, so
(03:26):
all of that being said, I thought we would bring
back this classic episode for you on female farmers, So
I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told
You from how stupp Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(03:48):
to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and this
week we're talking about women and agriculture, and today we're
focusing on farming and Caroline. This episode made me a
little bit jealous because I do not have a green thumb. No,
I I am at once accepting of the fact that
(04:10):
I have a brown or a black thumb, and in
denial because I understand that I have in fact killed
bamboo before i've killed a cactus. But on the other hand,
I am still ever optimistic. I purchased a whole bunch
of plants now that it's spring and it's warm and
like tropical in Atlanta. Already, I've purchased a bunch of
(04:32):
plants to keep at my boyfriend's house because I have
no yard. Um, and I am convinced that this year, Kristen,
this is the year that I'm going to keep them alive. Well,
I'll be rooting for you. I like, I'll be rooting
for the plants you as well, but but more the plants, Caroline,
I get it, rooting, rooting an intentional gardening. Pun didn't
(04:55):
even mean to make that happen. We're off to a
good story. Yeah, um, Well, I can't imagine, for one,
keeping a plant in a pot alive, but to keep
entire fields of plants alive is mind boggling to me
on a personal level. And when it comes to women
in farming, though, this is a really exciting time to
(05:16):
be a woman working the land because women have been
farming as long as men have been farming, really, But
in recent years there's been a lot more attention paid
to the role of women in agriculture. Yeah, we've got
this thing that is referred to across a whole bunch
of sources called the grass ceiling, that women are finally
(05:39):
cracking the grass ceiling, or I guess putting a shovel
in it. Yeah, we're getting out our lady lawnmowers and
mow it. Now, that's right, that's right, um. But a
lot of focus traditionally has been on women's role on
the farm being one of support. She's the supporting actress.
So she's at home at the farm. How she's cooking dinner,
(06:01):
she's paying the bill, she's making sure all of the
homestead stuff is taken care of while her cowboy farmer
husband is out on the tractor farming the fields. But
as we'll get into, women have so much more of
a role than just that. Then, not that there's anything
wrong with being at the homestead and cooking dinner and
all of that good stuff. But women do have an
(06:23):
incredibly active, rich, vital role out in the fields as well. Yeah,
no longer is the end all be all to become
a farmer's wife. Um and Barrett Brandt wrote about feminism
and the idea of the farmer's wife and the relationship
between farming women and feminism in a paper called on
(06:44):
the Relationship between Feminism and farm Women UH in the
journal Agriculture and Human Values, and she talks about how
in the nineteen eighties and nineties research on women farmers
consistently found those farming families, as you talked about, reflecting
these kinds of patriarchal power structures men as the landowners,
(07:04):
rendering women subordinate to them and in a lot of
ways even to the land. And I thought it was
interesting too that the f f A formerly known as
Future Farmers of America didn't even admit girls until nineteen
sixty nine, although, as reported on a couple of years ago,
in USA, today it's now made up a forty four
(07:27):
percent women compared to just women. So even when it
comes to youth and interest in farming, we're seeing a
growing interest among girls. But that's crazy to me that,
Like I I get the whole thing about attitudes about
women and not thinking that women are cut out for farming.
Like I understand that some of those attitudes existed and somehow,
(07:50):
you know, still do exist. But it's crazy to me
that in an organization called the Future Farmers of America,
they weren't even like, maybe we should let little girls
play well because they would be in the future farmer
Wives of America. Caroline, that's where the that's where the
girls would belong. I suppose under the old paradigm, I
(08:11):
should say, because as Helen Gunderson, who is a farmer
in northern Iowa told NPR not too long ago, quote,
girls could grow up to be farmers wives, but for
a woman to actually consider herself to be a farmer
or grow up to be a farmer, that wasn't in
the script. And she told n PR about how when
(08:32):
she was a young girl on her family farm, her
brothers were the ones who were being cultivated. I am
so sorry for all of these unintentional farming funds. By
the way, it's just gonna keep happening. They were being
cultivated for the later harvest of uh No, all of
her brothers were received all the attention from her dad
to make sure that they knew how to operate and
(08:54):
manage a farm from the more business side, whereas little
Helen was just suddenly, may you might grow up one
day and be a farmer's wife and you can live
off the land that way. Yeah. But she said that
when she talked to her dad about this, like, hey, dad,
you know years later when she came back and wanted
to be a farmer and wanted to have more of
a role out on the land, and she told her
to I was like, hey, you know, I really feel
like you put more of the focus on the boys.
(09:15):
Maybe is that a thing? And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah,
that sounds about right. So I mean, nobody's denying that
women were kind of being shuttled off into a different
direction the kitchen, but right exactly toward the kitchen or
the henhouse, right so to speak, or literally literally. And
that was also exemplified in a Super Bowl commercial a
couple of years ago which I remember, and the theme
(09:38):
was God Created a farmer, and it was this very uplifting,
beautifully shot commercial really celebrating the farmer, and as pointed
out in this USA Today article on the rise of
women in farming, almost all of the imagery in that
commercial was of men on tracked. There's men in the
(10:00):
pickup trucks, men on horseback. There were a couple of
women here and there, but overwhelmingly male farmers. Yeah, and
talking to USA Today Denis O'Brien, who has been farming
with her husband for just about forty years in Iowa,
so that, yeah, it's great that there's this tribute to
agriculture and that we still respect our farmers and we
(10:22):
want to pay tribute to them. But on the other hand,
she says, they're missing more than half the population that's
been involved with it. And so that's kind of what
we want to talk about today in this episode. We
want to show you that the stats regarding women and
farming are way better than you might expect, and they've
been getting better. According to the U s d A,
(10:43):
U S farms operated by women nearly tripled over the
past three decades, from five percent in nineteen fourteen percent
by two thousand seven. Now, of course, there is an
issue of of reporting um the U s d A's
agricultural SINCEUS only start accounting secondary farm operators including women
in two thousand two. And the whole issue there is
(11:05):
that a lot of smaller farms, you know, you might
think of the little organic farm in Vermont or something.
A lot of those smaller operations are run by women,
by people of color, and so those are the smaller
farms tend to be outside of the mainstream. But even
since two thousand two, when the USDA started including those
secondary farm operators, there has been a thirty percent jump
(11:29):
and women run farms, according to Lee Adcock, who is
the director of the Women Food and Agriculture Network. Now
there is a little bit of statistical conflict because we
also found a post over at the National Sustainable Agriculture
Commission which identified a six percent drop in women as
principal farm operators from two thousand seven to two thousand twelve.
(11:53):
But that was actually in statistical speak, that was more
of an outlier because in the past few years is
almost all the trend pieces have been all focused on
the rising role of women in agriculture, not just in
the United States but also around the world, happening at
such a pace that some are referring to this as
the feminization of agriculture. Yeah, And a large part of
(12:18):
this so called feminization is the fact that as society
has become more geared towards urban centers, men are leaving
the homes and the farms in the rural areas at
a greater pace lead, basically leaving women behind. And so
it's not necessarily that more women are setting out to
be farmers, although that is certainly the case in many areas,
(12:38):
but it also happens to be that they are sort
of left behind, so to speak. And because of how
unintentional this feminization of agriculture is, particularly in more developing nations,
the u N has actually put a lot of focus
on providing more resource for women farmers. Um So, for instance,
(13:02):
women farmers tend to own less fertile plots of land,
they tend to own fewer work animals, and also just
have less education in general. So with this growing responsibility
that women around the world are now having in terms
of the global food supply, the u N and a
lot of other NGOs are saying, hey, well, we need
(13:23):
to support them. We need to make sure that they
are on as equal footing with male farmers as possible
because the land that they have and they're tending and
harvesting is very important to feed us exactly what I
mean that is talking about the global the global farm
the global farming industry, but I think that exists here too.
(13:46):
We read plenty of stuff that talks about how quote
unquote minority farmers, whether that is someone who is a woman,
a person of color, a queer farmer. As we'll get
into a little bit later. Um, a lot of these
people who aren't part of the big, big industrial farm
complex have a lot of problems getting that important financial support,
(14:07):
especially in terms of things like going organic for instance,
to be able to get that U s d A funding.
It's harder for minority farmers sort of wherever you are.
And can I just call out a few of the
international women farmers that we ran across in our research,
Caroline Okay, So a lot of this was coming from
Modern Farmer, which recently won a national magazine award. And
(14:30):
I'll tell you what, friends, after spending a week on
the Modern Farmer website, I want to subscribe. It's fantastic.
It's a fantastic resource. And one of the things we
were looking at was this photo essay of women farmers
around the world, and among them were the seaweed mamas
of Zanzibar who harvest seaweed that we probably enjoy in
(14:54):
our farmers markets or at our local sushi restaurant. UM
also earl Nepalese women who make up a majority of
soul landowners in Nepal. And then there was another post
about the Yamagata Girls Farm in Japan where it's this
a group of young women who have started up a
(15:15):
farm in Japan. It's exactly what it sounds like. Um.
So it's really interesting to see beyond our own backyards,
how women are, you know, paving their own way in agriculture.
But then the question becomes why more women, especially when
we look back in the United States and we see
(15:37):
all of these trend pieces reporting on those uh, those
USDA statistics saying hey, there are more women running farms.
What's going on? Well, you know, like we touched on earlier,
the census is counting more of those small secondary farm operators,
a lot of whom are women, and most female run
(15:58):
farms do tend to be small, are and more diverse,
and many are part of the organic and local food movements.
Most also have annual sales under ten thousand dollars. And
this is coming from that same NPR interview with Lee Adcock,
the director of the Women Food and Agriculture Network, and
(16:18):
she was saying that by far the biggest percentage of
that increase in women farmers is women with small acreages
making not a whole lot of money, but making some
money from agriculture and often raising food or livestock for food.
And she says that they are really out there. They're
out there working and they are raising the food that
we are eating. But she says they're not getting into
(16:40):
farming to run quarter million dollar combines. They're out there
raising food. And this was something that Sonya Faruki also
explored over at The Atlantic in terms of gender and
big agri business the Tyson Foods, for instance, the the
ubiquitous chicken that you might see in your grocery stores.
(17:01):
She says that women are scarce when it comes to
running those large scale, big factory farms, and using Tyson
as an example, Tyson Foods has one woman on its
executive team. But at the same time, Paruki says, it's
not that surprising to not see that many women, particularly
(17:22):
in the leadership there might be working in the factories,
but not many women in the leadership of agribusiness, because
that's usually not where our interest lies when it comes
to farming. We're far more interested on average, in these smaller,
more sustainable, slower kinds of food operations. Yeah, and she
(17:43):
says that when you look at four of the biggest
multibillion dollar factory farm corporations, women cumulatively constitute less than
ten percent of senior executives. And she's arguing in her
article though, that it would be only a good thing,
only a positive thing, to get more and more women
on boards on executive teams, because she argues that women
(18:05):
have a different perspective, that yes, we tend to want
to be part of the smaller, organic, you know, homegrown,
more local operations, but that our perspective on things like
organic food, cage free eggs, animal cruelty could help benefit
the rest of the industry. Yeah, And when it comes
to those large factory farms, that's something that we're going
(18:26):
to talk about a little bit more in our next
podcast this week, which is all about Loria Suerta, a
woman who took on directly some of those big farms
out in California. UM but looking back at those women
farmers um the rise of farmers markets, local local farmers markets,
which is something that we've seen here where we live
(18:48):
in Atlanta, has been highly attractive for female producers. C says,
working with farm to table restaurants, the entire slow food
movement has been really really attractive um to newer women
farmers coming into the fold. And there's also just in
general more opportunity by virtue, for instance of farmland family
(19:09):
farmland changing hands as baby boomers age. Yeah, and just
the fact that it'll it's going to eventually start to
be less weird in the public imagination that a woman
could run a big farm and sit on a tractor
and have it not be a big deal. And so
maybe people like Helen Gunderson and her family it won't
be such a thing of like, well, we're definitely passing
(19:30):
this down just to the sons, and the daughter can
go find something else to do. Old McDonald is going
to become old ms donald. Huh, that's right, And and
Ms McDonald we'll have the chance to get in on
this because according to USA Today, there are about two
hundred million plus acres of farmland in the US that
(19:50):
will change hands by and there's a real potential for
women to end up owning half of that land. Yeah,
and that's why you're seeing more and more women focused
groups emerging like Women Food and Agriculture Network and smaller
operations like Annie's Project that directly serve women interested in
(20:11):
farming to teach them not only how to grow crops,
but also how to manage a farm business. And globally too,
we see organizations like Landessa and one Percent for Women
that also focus more on things like land use rights
and supporting those women in agriculture who might need more
(20:32):
of a leg up in the context of being in
a developing country. And you've got the issue too that
we've touched on about women's interests growing in farming, particularly
in sustainable agriculture, because traditionally women have been likelier to
control household diets themselves, so they maybe perhaps are more
likely to go in the direction of sustainability in organic farming,
(20:56):
fewer pesticides, things like that. And when you look at
nonprofits who are focused on sustainable agriculture issues, women compose
sixty one and a half percent of those employees and
of those organizations executive directors. And then there are also
the responses of women farmers themselves about what personally motivates
(21:19):
them to have to pursue this career and lifestyle that
isn't necessarily easy. And uh Audrey Mulcan, who is a
photographer who created the Female Farmer Project documenting women farmers
across the United States, posted on her like fan Facebook
(21:40):
page asking her followers what draws women to farming and
so the responses included nurturing, a desire to set a
good ecological example for children, creativity, exhibiting strength, the fact
that women are natural feeders and cultivators, and also a
desire to make a differ friends. So there really does
(22:01):
seem to be for a lot of women and farming
this connection between themselves as women and how they see
themselves in that role, and that connection to the earth
and too being mothers and also to food production. But
as we're going to talk about in the second half
(22:21):
of the podcast, for some women, farming is a feminist
act as well. So over at bitch Alice Parker writes
about the eco feminist movement. Perhaps you've read about eco
(22:41):
feminism and the links between feminism womanhood the traditional definition
of that versus the definition that we would perhaps be
aspiring to as farmers. Um and Parker writes about shopping
at a farmer's market and buying raw fermented sarakraut locally
or direct from a farmer, doing all of these things
(23:02):
like knitting your own clothes, riding your bicycle, cooking something
simple from scratch. She talks about them as feminist acts.
It might not seem obvious, they might seem small, like
they're very unimportant personal acts, but she says they oppose
and unweave heartless systems of oppression like factory farms and sweatshops.
These oppressive systems, she writes, carry the real prison walls,
(23:25):
not your kitchen. And so it is. It's that argument
that a lot of people make, whether it's about farming
or something like the New domesticity movement, that being a provider,
being the person who's raising the food, raising the livestock,
knitting those hats, it doesn't have to be an oppressive act.
What's oppressive, a lot of these people argue, is participating
(23:47):
in a capitalist system that exploits workers. Yeah, and also
many would viably argue poisons the land and food as
well through the use of things like pesticides and if
you want to learn more, are about ecofeminism. We've done
an entire podcast all about that, so we're not going
to get into the nuts and bolts of it, but
(24:07):
you can find that podcast over at stuff Mom Never
Told You dot com. But we do want to mention
briefly the women's land movement of the nineteen seventies, and
that is women with a Y, because these were radical
feminists who formed separatist agricultural communities, including places like yellow
(24:27):
Hammer and Woman Share, as a way to fully liberate
themselves from the patriarchy. And again, there is a great
piece on this in Modern Farmer, my new favorite magazine,
not even Jumping, and it was fascinating to see how
there was It was radical feminism and also lesbianism combined
(24:50):
with agriculture. Some call this a take back the Land movement,
where these women really firmly believed that they needed it
to eradicate me in from their lives completely, whether that's
sexually or whether that is in like in any way
providing for their livelihood. They were like, we don't need you,
(25:10):
We're just gonna we're gonna take back the land. Essentially, Yeah,
but unlike a lot of farms today. I think the
focus was more on the act of separating themselves from
men and the traditional system of being with men depending
on men for providing, you know, of depending on those
big factory farms. The focus wasn't so much on the
(25:32):
actual farming itself, which I think is different from a
lot of today's farms where the farmer identity sort of
comes first. In a lot of cases, well, it's more
about the food as politics rather than the the food
coming second to politics and personal politics. Although they did
(25:53):
have their own Indian magazines and newsletters like Country Women,
which I wish I could still subscribe, And while they
were successful in demonstrating the fact that oh look, hey,
women can actually grow well some women, not me. Typically
women can actually grow plants, they can farm, they can
be successful growers. This movement, and this has been a
(26:15):
criticism of many parts of Second Way feminism. This movement
was mostly made up of white, middle class radical feminists,
and it highlights the racial disparity that still to some
extent exists within local food and c s A and
the farmers market movements. Yeah, I mean these a lot
(26:36):
of these women who were part of the land movement
met in liberal arts colleges. For instance, you're coming from
a privileged position when you in the background of saying cushi,
you're sort of higher education context. Separate yourself willfully and
pursue this kind of lifestyle, which which will directly contrast
(26:59):
actually what we're going to talk about in our next
podcast with Dolora Suerta and the Chicano civil rights movement
happening in California around the same time. But when you
look at your local CSA today, when you go to
your local farmers market today, there are lots of questions
that are being raised about who those farmers markets and
(27:23):
that wonderful organic sustainable agriculture is feeding. Because if you
look at lower income areas and areas that might have
higher concentrations of people of color, they are often in
food deserts. They don't have as much access, and the
food that we're talking about is often more expensive. It's
usually too expensive for me, Caroline, and it is important
(27:45):
to bring up these disparities that exist within things like
the organic food movement, within the farmers market movement and
the rise and farmers market popularity. But side note fun
fact to Schegee Professor Dr book or T. Watley's Pick
your Own Farms and Clientele membership Club's idea in the
early nineteen eighties was really what laid the groundwork for
(28:08):
C S a S. Though credit is usually attributed to
other people. Yeah, we read about that in Mother Earth
News and we wanted to mention it just because it
is an example of often the erasure of farmers of color,
which is what we wanted to talk about as well,
because black farmers make up just about two per cent
(28:30):
of the total farming population. And when it comes to
agriculture and people of color and we're talking about the
United States, no big surprise that there's been a lot
of structural racism embedded within the industries. I mean, going
back even pre slavery, just to the days of out
(28:52):
and outland theft from Native Americans taking their farmland to
then slavery and then share cropping in than today with
these massive agribusinesses and its reliance on immigrant labor, often
cheap and exploited immigrant labor, which again we'll get way
more into in our next episode. But so you can
(29:13):
understand then how it's sort of a complicated issue sometimes
when people of color want to come back and reclaim
that land because it's so deeply embedded. Our country's relationship
with people of color and agriculture is so deeply embedded. Well,
it's been something that families have tried to climb out
of and so for some people today it would seem
(29:36):
regressive to then want to go back and farm. And
in fact, I mean the relationship between farmers of color
in the U. S. Government is still a testy one
because many have filed civil suits against the U. S.
D A for receiving less government funding compared to white farmers.
So there are still questions of discrimination. And then when
(29:59):
we talk about women farmers of color, we have layers
of discrimination upon layers of discrimination. Yeah, but it's interesting
though that a greater proportion of women of color operate
farms than do white women. Because if you look back
to stats from fourteen percent of female principal farm operators
were African American versus twenty percent of them being Asian
(30:21):
and thirty percent were Native American compared to of female
principal farm operators who were white in twelve And because
of you know, the existence of this diversity, but at
the same time, still going back to our collective idea
of what a farmer looks like. It's old McDonald. It's
usually an older white gentleman with a pitchfork and a
(30:44):
plaid shirt and overalls and a little straw hat. Rd
an non attractor. Natasha Bowen's a k a. Brown Girl farming,
started blogging about diversity and farming and also started something
called the Color of Food Project to document the lives
and the crops of farmers of color around the United States. Yeah,
(31:08):
this was really interesting looking at women who, like you
said Kristen, felt almost compelled to leave rural areas, especially
in the Southeast, to leave those rural areas, leave that
history that is so the racial aspects intertwined with agriculture,
to leave that all behind. And then how when they
got older they realized, Know, what I want to do
(31:28):
is go back to the land, whether it's to whether
it's a political statement, or whether it's to really just
take care of my family or your community, like the
example of the woman in the Lower ninth Ward in
New Orleans starting a garden to feed that community. Yeah,
and if you look at Natasha bow and herself, she
has a really interesting take on farming and femininity because
(31:52):
She says that I've personally never felt more like a
woman then the first time I dug my hands into
the soil. And that's a statement that not align with
what society defines as feminine getting our hands dirty, writing tractors,
hurting cattle. So affirming that feminine identity with the land
and finding that solidarity while out on the road for
(32:12):
the Color of Food was so important to me. And
I love that because you really can argue that either
way that farming is super traditionally feminine, if we go
all the way back to hunter gatherers, men hunting, maybe
women gathering and farming um, or if you go all
the way to the other side and say that it's
it's totally unexpected, it's non traditional work for women well,
(32:36):
and for a lot of people, farming is radical as well.
A lot of what Bowen's has discovered and talked about
through the Color of Food project is the food justice movement,
that intersection of you know, providing this kind of healthy,
sustainable food for these communities that are usually not so
(33:00):
linked in with their local farmers markets um. And she
says that women are leading the food justice movement for
farm workers, and she calls out examples like the Coalition
of Immokali Workers in Florida, UM also women like Sorrujeriaman
of Roku United, the author of Behind the Kitchen Door
(33:22):
that talks about injustice of women working in the food
system's restaurant industry. She says, the impact is heavy on
every level from farm to table when it comes to
women in our overall food system, from seed to table.
And we're also seeing a rise in organizations like Southeastern
(33:43):
African American Farmers Organic Network that helped train and mentor
Black organic farmers. But it's interesting about that organization. While
it is certainly not focused solely on women, what people
within that organization have noticed is that more and more
people that they're dealing with are women. They're women farmers,
especially in the Southeast, who are seeking more resources, basically
(34:05):
more kind of like friends in the farming business. And
in addition to farmers of color organizing, getting more recognition
and really fighting for food justice and seeing those intersections
between identity politics and what is on our plates, we
also have to talk about LGBT farmers, who are another
(34:28):
group challenging the status quo of who can be a
farmer and what a farmer looks like. And this was
something that was really publicized on a more national level
by Jonah Mossburg's documentary out Here Yeah. The documentary highlighted
a queer grassroots farming movement around the country basically, and
(34:51):
for Mossburg, he said that living in a rural setting
really helped him to get more comfortable in his own skin.
He says that it made me feel strong, it made
me feel everyone else around me because Mossburg is a
trans farmer. And what's so interesting in listening to not
only what Mossburg has to say, but talking to other
(35:11):
farmers too, is that he makes it clear that sort
of the farming identity is almost above everything else, and
that when you are farming, when you've got your hands
in the dirt, when you're in touch with the land
or you know the animals that you're raising, it's almost
kind of an equalizer. And so I love this idea
that we saw in a couple of different places about
(35:31):
how minority farmers, whether you're a woman, a woman of color,
uh an LGBT farmer, you're you're queering the farming system
and that it's less about being gay, being lesbian, being
a trans farmer, and so much more about just being
almost an unexpected farmer, being an outsider who's working to
change that industry. Well, and we probably don't think of
(35:55):
rural America as necessarily being a safe space for l
g b t Q individuals, but Mossburg told Bitch magazine,
and this was also echoed by other farmers that you
talked to in out here. He said, quote, I think
small scale sustainable agriculture is inherently a logical and safe
place for queer people because it's a place where we
(36:17):
can enact and practice our queer values. And a lot
of times in those farming communities, it seems like from
the people that they've talked to, it's more about the
connection to the land and the animals and what you
are harvesting that often is more more of a focal
(36:38):
point than who you are, if that makes sense. But
it seems like the common thread through all of these
different groups of people is that they're bringing different perspectives
to farming and how important that is. I mean, just
like we talked about getting different perspectives in any industry,
in any line of work, and and what a difference
(36:59):
that different types of people can make, especially when it
comes to our own health and the food that we
put in our bodies. Yeah. And I was really hardened
to see as well that the U s D the
U s d A has been supporting that queering of
the farm system. Is Mossburg put it because it and
the National Center for Lesbian Rights now host a rural
(37:20):
pride campaign, which is great. And can I just mention
my favorite quote from Mossburg Um in which a bitch
asked what the queerest vegetable was and he said, it's
not rainbow charred. Everybody always says rainbow chart. There is,
in fact, um an lgbt Q farming group out in
(37:41):
the San Francisco Bay area that I think is called
the rainbow Chart Coalition. Um, he says it's not that.
He thinks it's silariac. Yeah, and maybe you want to
go buy it immediately, I know his description of cooking
with it. I was like, oh man, I need to
get my boyfriend to cook with this. And what a
how There there was also um a goat farmer who
(38:03):
runs a farm called like Sassy Nanny's or something like
that and makes incredible cheese. It was great to just
see all these profiles of you know, these lgbt Q farmers,
these farmers of color, these women farmers, all of these
people who are reclaiming land in their own ways, and
also considering, Caroline, how much it contrasts my day today,
(38:26):
highly urbanized life, and imagining what what a joy that
pace must be like. Not I mean, they're waking up
a lot earlier than I am, I'm sure, and farming
is not easy by any means, um, But just to
think about how much those people that we've been talking
(38:49):
about and reading about appreciate the land and what they
do so much, um economy me want to go be
a farmer to be honest. Yeah, I mean there was
there was an attitude kind of in in several of
the people we read about who were sort of opting
out of that that urban uh nine to five lifestyle,
(39:11):
who were pursuing something different, whether it was for political
reasons or purely personal, wanting to get back in touch
with a more quote unquote a more natural way of living,
of of living off the land, and just just fascinating
to see how that idea of what a farmer looks
like is absolutely changing. So I really hope there are
(39:34):
some farmers listening urban farmers, community gardeners. I don't care
if you can grow plants. Hey, you're a farmer in
our books. We want to hear from you though. Mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
UM and any thoughts on sustainable agriculture, food deserts, food
justice and this idea of queering our food system. Let
(39:57):
us know all of your thoughts. Mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com again is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom stuff Podcasts or messages
on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break. So I have a letter here about our
episode on passive aggressive behavior. And you know, in the episode,
(40:21):
we pointed out that the stereotype is that for women
are passive aggressive than men, that it's totally a woman thing,
but that in reality it's way more of a kind
of fifty split. And so we have a letter here
from Brittany kind of talking about that. She says, just
wanted to say a great job on the passive aggressive
episode of the podcast. When I first saw the title,
(40:43):
I thought, oh yeah, I definitely think it's more gendered
towards females, but as you discussed it, I actually felt
like my husband fit a lot of these categories, but
in different ways. I can't believe the term, oh, I'm
only kidding never came up. We've had so many conversations
about this in my relationship. I feel like my husband
(41:04):
is constantly teasing or giving smart slash harsh remarks in
the name of humor, and now I'm wondering if that's
just his version of being passive aggressive. For what it's worth,
he claims it's a remnant of his time in the military,
which ties him perfectly to the beginning of that episode.
I think girl on girl passive aggressiveness maybe more common
(41:25):
than male on male passive aggression, but I would argue
that when it comes to straight CIS gender relationships between
males and females, both platonic and romantic, they're equally full
of passive aggressiveness on both sides, even if it displays differently,
perhaps because of ingrained beliefs in physical power discrepancies. Question Mark,
(41:46):
thanks for the podcast and thanks for all you do,
and thank you Brittany Well, Caroline. I have a letter here,
also from a Brittany, and it's on our o c
D podcast, um and Brittany writes, I wanted to share
my youngest brother's story. He was completely quote normal as
a young child, and suddenly, when he was about thirteen
(42:06):
or fourteen, he began to exhibit intense, typically O c
D like symptoms. He washed his hands to the point
that they cracked in blood. He would only use one
bathroom out of the four in my parents home because
he felt he that was the only clean one, even
though my parents got a very clean house. After taking
him to the therapist for months with no results and
(42:27):
in fact worsening symptoms, my frustrated mom resorted to researching
his symptoms for self and came across a rare syndrome
called PANDOUS, which stands for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated
with streptococcal infections. Basically, it's a mouthful that means kids
who have had strepped sometimes develop an autoimmune reaction to
(42:50):
the bacteria, which causes their immune system to begin attacking
their brains, leading to symptoms that can look like O
c D or other psychiatric disorders. It turns out that
existence of pandas is not agreed upon in the medical community.
And my brother's pediatrician wouldn't take my mother's inquiry about
it seriously. My mom didn't give up there, however, and
went to locate an immunologists slash PANDAS specialist a few
(43:14):
hours away. In one visit, the specialist confirmed my brother's
diagnosis as PANDAS rather than true O c D. He
was prescribed a heavy round of antibiotics to kill off
the strap bacteria. Within a week of taking the antibiotics,
my brother's symptoms were noticeably improved, and within a month
he was back to normal. I just wanted to share
this in case it might be helpful to other listeners,
(43:35):
especially since PANDAS can mask itself as O c D,
but is in fact very rare and hard to diagnose.
So thanks for the heads of Brittany, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us Mom seven House. Stuffworks dot
Com is where you can send us your letters and
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos and podcasts, including this one
(43:56):
with our sources so you can see all of these
modern farmer articles I am now obsessed with. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works? Dot com
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff
I've never told reproduction of iHeart Radios? How stuff? First?
Did you do not like my rendition of that one?
Was that supposed to be hay go off my outcast?
Maybe a little fly? It was an interesting bake. I
(00:30):
have just spent four days in Dothan, Alabama, which hilariously
randomly is where my mom is from. So I used
to go there two to three times a year until
I was fourteen or fifteen, for you know, holidays and
stuff to visit my grandparents and my aunts and uncles.
But this was for a peanut conference, right, I mean
my peanut butter before you leave. By the way, I
(00:51):
have cases of it, gifted es with cases. They're very nice.
But anyway, the classic we're bringing to you today is
about farmers and specifically women, right, farmers and um, this
is something I learned a lot about at this peanut conference.
I could tell you so much about peanuts. I've learned
so much. I guess you're not allergic to it. Oh no,
(01:15):
Buttter is probably my favorite food. It's also my dog's
favorite foods. So there you go. Yeah, I feel like
for those of us Um, I don't know. Did you
ever have any experience farming? I grew up in La j, Georgia,
which does have farming, so it was poultry and a
lot more beef, so we had cow farms as well
as a lot of chicken farms, so not so much
(01:36):
like garden gardens. We don't have too much of that,
although I did live around a lot of orchards because
we are the apple capital of Georgia, not the US
of Georgia, so I did grow up a lot around that,
but not technically. I don't think I'm new too many
farmer farmers outright, like vegetable farmers. Sure, I didn't have
(01:58):
much experience with it. My school did have a four
each branch. Oh yeah, we did, to my elementary school
and middle school. But we also had a big f
a yeah brand Future Farmers of America. Yeah, so okay,
I guess that's the same thing. And I it's something
that I'm really passionate about because as as most of
(02:18):
you probably know, I do show on food podcast on
food called Savor, and I had the show without me.
Oh no, how dare you? It's just finding out now, um,
but being aware of where our food comes from and
the people behind that food and how did it get
to where you are, and appreciating the labor behind it
because and I think we are moving more towards that.
(02:40):
But for a while, we were very separate, at least
here in America from our food. It was just something
a commodity and you didn't think about. All you really
cared about was how much it costs. And I was
in that too, But on this trip I felt I
was really happy to be able to talk with farmers
UM and here from them and right now we're in
(03:01):
the middle of a pretty serious drought in Georgia most
of the South and just to see how it impacts everybody,
and UM, just hearing from them firsthand. And also a
lot of the people I spoke to UM, some of
them women actually, mostly the Women Love podcast which they
listen while they're doing things around the farm. Yeah, so
(03:26):
all of that being said, I thought we would bring
back this classic episode for you on female farmers, So
I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told
You from how stupp Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(03:48):
to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and this
week we're talking about women and agriculture, and today we're
focusing on farming and Caroline. This episode made me a
little bit jealous because I do not have a green thumb. No,
I I am at once accepting of the fact that
(04:10):
I have a brown or a black thumb, and in
denial because I understand that I have in fact killed
bamboo before i've killed a cactus. But on the other hand,
I am still ever optimistic. I purchased a whole bunch
of plants now that it's spring and it's warm and
like tropical in Atlanta. Already, I've purchased a bunch of
(04:32):
plants to keep at my boyfriend's house because I have
no yard. Um, and I am convinced that this year, Kristen,
this is the year that I'm going to keep them alive. Well,
I'll be rooting for you. I like, I'll be rooting
for the plants you as well, but but more the plants, Caroline,
I get it, rooting, rooting an intentional gardening. Pun didn't
(04:55):
even mean to make that happen. We're off to a
good story. Yeah, um, Well, I can't imagine, for one,
keeping a plant in a pot alive, but to keep
entire fields of plants alive is mind boggling to me
on a personal level. And when it comes to women
in farming, though, this is a really exciting time to
(05:16):
be a woman working the land because women have been
farming as long as men have been farming, really, But
in recent years there's been a lot more attention paid
to the role of women in agriculture. Yeah, we've got
this thing that is referred to across a whole bunch
of sources called the grass ceiling, that women are finally
(05:39):
cracking the grass ceiling, or I guess putting a shovel
in it. Yeah, we're getting out our lady lawnmowers and
mow it. Now, that's right, that's right, um. But a
lot of focus traditionally has been on women's role on
the farm being one of support. She's the supporting actress.
So she's at home at the farm. How she's cooking dinner,
(06:01):
she's paying the bill, she's making sure all of the
homestead stuff is taken care of while her cowboy farmer
husband is out on the tractor farming the fields. But
as we'll get into, women have so much more of
a role than just that. Then, not that there's anything
wrong with being at the homestead and cooking dinner and
all of that good stuff. But women do have an
(06:23):
incredibly active, rich, vital role out in the fields as well. Yeah,
no longer is the end all be all to become
a farmer's wife. Um and Barrett Brandt wrote about feminism
and the idea of the farmer's wife and the relationship
between farming women and feminism in a paper called on
(06:44):
the Relationship between Feminism and farm Women UH in the
journal Agriculture and Human Values, and she talks about how
in the nineteen eighties and nineties research on women farmers
consistently found those farming families, as you talked about, reflecting
these kinds of patriarchal power structures men as the landowners,
(07:04):
rendering women subordinate to them and in a lot of
ways even to the land. And I thought it was
interesting too that the f f A formerly known as
Future Farmers of America didn't even admit girls until nineteen
sixty nine, although, as reported on a couple of years ago,
in USA, today it's now made up a forty four
(07:27):
percent women compared to just women. So even when it
comes to youth and interest in farming, we're seeing a
growing interest among girls. But that's crazy to me that,
Like I I get the whole thing about attitudes about
women and not thinking that women are cut out for farming.
Like I understand that some of those attitudes existed and somehow,
(07:50):
you know, still do exist. But it's crazy to me
that in an organization called the Future Farmers of America,
they weren't even like, maybe we should let little girls
play well because they would be in the future farmer
Wives of America. Caroline, that's where the that's where the
girls would belong. I suppose under the old paradigm, I
(08:11):
should say, because as Helen Gunderson, who is a farmer
in northern Iowa told NPR not too long ago, quote,
girls could grow up to be farmers wives, but for
a woman to actually consider herself to be a farmer
or grow up to be a farmer, that wasn't in
the script. And she told n PR about how when
(08:32):
she was a young girl on her family farm, her
brothers were the ones who were being cultivated. I am
so sorry for all of these unintentional farming funds. By
the way, it's just gonna keep happening. They were being
cultivated for the later harvest of uh No, all of
her brothers were received all the attention from her dad
to make sure that they knew how to operate and
(08:54):
manage a farm from the more business side, whereas little
Helen was just suddenly, may you might grow up one
day and be a farmer's wife and you can live
off the land that way. Yeah. But she said that
when she talked to her dad about this, like, hey, dad,
you know years later when she came back and wanted
to be a farmer and wanted to have more of
a role out on the land, and she told her
to I was like, hey, you know, I really feel
like you put more of the focus on the boys.
(09:15):
Maybe is that a thing? And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah,
that sounds about right. So I mean, nobody's denying that
women were kind of being shuttled off into a different
direction the kitchen, but right exactly toward the kitchen or
the henhouse, right so to speak, or literally literally. And
that was also exemplified in a Super Bowl commercial a
couple of years ago which I remember, and the theme
(09:38):
was God Created a farmer, and it was this very uplifting,
beautifully shot commercial really celebrating the farmer, and as pointed
out in this USA Today article on the rise of
women in farming, almost all of the imagery in that
commercial was of men on tracked. There's men in the
(10:00):
pickup trucks, men on horseback. There were a couple of
women here and there, but overwhelmingly male farmers. Yeah, and
talking to USA Today Denis O'Brien, who has been farming
with her husband for just about forty years in Iowa,
so that, yeah, it's great that there's this tribute to
agriculture and that we still respect our farmers and we
(10:22):
want to pay tribute to them. But on the other hand,
she says, they're missing more than half the population that's
been involved with it. And so that's kind of what
we want to talk about today in this episode. We
want to show you that the stats regarding women and
farming are way better than you might expect, and they've
been getting better. According to the U s d A,
(10:43):
U S farms operated by women nearly tripled over the
past three decades, from five percent in nineteen fourteen percent
by two thousand seven. Now, of course, there is an
issue of of reporting um the U s d A's
agricultural SINCEUS only start accounting secondary farm operators including women
in two thousand two. And the whole issue there is
(11:05):
that a lot of smaller farms, you know, you might
think of the little organic farm in Vermont or something.
A lot of those smaller operations are run by women,
by people of color, and so those are the smaller
farms tend to be outside of the mainstream. But even
since two thousand two, when the USDA started including those
secondary farm operators, there has been a thirty percent jump
(11:29):
and women run farms, according to Lee Adcock, who is
the director of the Women Food and Agriculture Network. Now
there is a little bit of statistical conflict because we
also found a post over at the National Sustainable Agriculture
Commission which identified a six percent drop in women as
principal farm operators from two thousand seven to two thousand twelve.
(11:53):
But that was actually in statistical speak, that was more
of an outlier because in the past few years is
almost all the trend pieces have been all focused on
the rising role of women in agriculture, not just in
the United States but also around the world, happening at
such a pace that some are referring to this as
the feminization of agriculture. Yeah, And a large part of
(12:18):
this so called feminization is the fact that as society
has become more geared towards urban centers, men are leaving
the homes and the farms in the rural areas at
a greater pace lead, basically leaving women behind. And so
it's not necessarily that more women are setting out to
be farmers, although that is certainly the case in many areas,
(12:38):
but it also happens to be that they are sort
of left behind, so to speak. And because of how
unintentional this feminization of agriculture is, particularly in more developing nations,
the u N has actually put a lot of focus
on providing more resource for women farmers. Um So, for instance,
(13:02):
women farmers tend to own less fertile plots of land,
they tend to own fewer work animals, and also just
have less education in general. So with this growing responsibility
that women around the world are now having in terms
of the global food supply, the u N and a
lot of other NGOs are saying, hey, well, we need
(13:23):
to support them. We need to make sure that they
are on as equal footing with male farmers as possible
because the land that they have and they're tending and
harvesting is very important to feed us exactly what I
mean that is talking about the global the global farm
the global farming industry, but I think that exists here too.
(13:46):
We read plenty of stuff that talks about how quote
unquote minority farmers, whether that is someone who is a woman,
a person of color, a queer farmer. As we'll get
into a little bit later. Um, a lot of these
people who aren't part of the big, big industrial farm
complex have a lot of problems getting that important financial support,
(14:07):
especially in terms of things like going organic for instance,
to be able to get that U s d A funding.
It's harder for minority farmers sort of wherever you are.
And can I just call out a few of the
international women farmers that we ran across in our research,
Caroline Okay, So a lot of this was coming from
Modern Farmer, which recently won a national magazine award. And
(14:30):
I'll tell you what, friends, after spending a week on
the Modern Farmer website, I want to subscribe. It's fantastic.
It's a fantastic resource. And one of the things we
were looking at was this photo essay of women farmers
around the world, and among them were the seaweed mamas
of Zanzibar who harvest seaweed that we probably enjoy in
(14:54):
our farmers markets or at our local sushi restaurant. UM
also earl Nepalese women who make up a majority of
soul landowners in Nepal. And then there was another post
about the Yamagata Girls Farm in Japan where it's this
a group of young women who have started up a
(15:15):
farm in Japan. It's exactly what it sounds like. Um.
So it's really interesting to see beyond our own backyards,
how women are, you know, paving their own way in agriculture.
But then the question becomes why more women, especially when
we look back in the United States and we see
(15:37):
all of these trend pieces reporting on those uh, those
USDA statistics saying hey, there are more women running farms.
What's going on? Well, you know, like we touched on earlier,
the census is counting more of those small secondary farm operators,
a lot of whom are women, and most female run
(15:58):
farms do tend to be small, are and more diverse,
and many are part of the organic and local food movements.
Most also have annual sales under ten thousand dollars. And
this is coming from that same NPR interview with Lee Adcock,
the director of the Women Food and Agriculture Network, and
(16:18):
she was saying that by far the biggest percentage of
that increase in women farmers is women with small acreages
making not a whole lot of money, but making some
money from agriculture and often raising food or livestock for food.
And she says that they are really out there. They're
out there working and they are raising the food that
we are eating. But she says they're not getting into
(16:40):
farming to run quarter million dollar combines. They're out there
raising food. And this was something that Sonya Faruki also
explored over at The Atlantic in terms of gender and
big agri business the Tyson Foods, for instance, the the
ubiquitous chicken that you might see in your grocery stores.
(17:01):
She says that women are scarce when it comes to
running those large scale, big factory farms, and using Tyson
as an example, Tyson Foods has one woman on its
executive team. But at the same time, Paruki says, it's
not that surprising to not see that many women, particularly
(17:22):
in the leadership there might be working in the factories,
but not many women in the leadership of agribusiness, because
that's usually not where our interest lies when it comes
to farming. We're far more interested on average, in these smaller,
more sustainable, slower kinds of food operations. Yeah, and she
(17:43):
says that when you look at four of the biggest
multibillion dollar factory farm corporations, women cumulatively constitute less than
ten percent of senior executives. And she's arguing in her
article though, that it would be only a good thing,
only a positive thing, to get more and more women
on boards on executive teams, because she argues that women
(18:05):
have a different perspective, that yes, we tend to want
to be part of the smaller, organic, you know, homegrown,
more local operations, but that our perspective on things like
organic food, cage free eggs, animal cruelty could help benefit
the rest of the industry. Yeah, And when it comes
to those large factory farms, that's something that we're going
(18:26):
to talk about a little bit more in our next
podcast this week, which is all about Loria Suerta, a
woman who took on directly some of those big farms
out in California. UM but looking back at those women
farmers um the rise of farmers markets, local local farmers markets,
which is something that we've seen here where we live
(18:48):
in Atlanta, has been highly attractive for female producers. C says,
working with farm to table restaurants, the entire slow food
movement has been really really attractive um to newer women
farmers coming into the fold. And there's also just in
general more opportunity by virtue, for instance of farmland family
(19:09):
farmland changing hands as baby boomers age. Yeah, and just
the fact that it'll it's going to eventually start to
be less weird in the public imagination that a woman
could run a big farm and sit on a tractor
and have it not be a big deal. And so
maybe people like Helen Gunderson and her family it won't
be such a thing of like, well, we're definitely passing
(19:30):
this down just to the sons, and the daughter can
go find something else to do. Old McDonald is going
to become old ms donald. Huh, that's right, And and
Ms McDonald we'll have the chance to get in on
this because according to USA Today, there are about two
hundred million plus acres of farmland in the US that
(19:50):
will change hands by and there's a real potential for
women to end up owning half of that land. Yeah,
and that's why you're seeing more and more women focused
groups emerging like Women Food and Agriculture Network and smaller
operations like Annie's Project that directly serve women interested in
(20:11):
farming to teach them not only how to grow crops,
but also how to manage a farm business. And globally too,
we see organizations like Landessa and one Percent for Women
that also focus more on things like land use rights
and supporting those women in agriculture who might need more
(20:32):
of a leg up in the context of being in
a developing country. And you've got the issue too that
we've touched on about women's interests growing in farming, particularly
in sustainable agriculture, because traditionally women have been likelier to
control household diets themselves, so they maybe perhaps are more
likely to go in the direction of sustainability in organic farming,
(20:56):
fewer pesticides, things like that. And when you look at
nonprofits who are focused on sustainable agriculture issues, women compose
sixty one and a half percent of those employees and
of those organizations executive directors. And then there are also
the responses of women farmers themselves about what personally motivates
(21:19):
them to have to pursue this career and lifestyle that
isn't necessarily easy. And uh Audrey Mulcan, who is a
photographer who created the Female Farmer Project documenting women farmers
across the United States, posted on her like fan Facebook
(21:40):
page asking her followers what draws women to farming and
so the responses included nurturing, a desire to set a
good ecological example for children, creativity, exhibiting strength, the fact
that women are natural feeders and cultivators, and also a
desire to make a differ friends. So there really does
(22:01):
seem to be for a lot of women and farming
this connection between themselves as women and how they see
themselves in that role, and that connection to the earth
and too being mothers and also to food production. But
as we're going to talk about in the second half
(22:21):
of the podcast, for some women, farming is a feminist
act as well. So over at bitch Alice Parker writes
about the eco feminist movement. Perhaps you've read about eco
(22:41):
feminism and the links between feminism womanhood the traditional definition
of that versus the definition that we would perhaps be
aspiring to as farmers. Um and Parker writes about shopping
at a farmer's market and buying raw fermented sarakraut locally
or direct from a farmer, doing all of these things
(23:02):
like knitting your own clothes, riding your bicycle, cooking something
simple from scratch. She talks about them as feminist acts.
It might not seem obvious, they might seem small, like
they're very unimportant personal acts, but she says they oppose
and unweave heartless systems of oppression like factory farms and sweatshops.
These oppressive systems, she writes, carry the real prison walls,
(23:25):
not your kitchen. And so it is. It's that argument
that a lot of people make, whether it's about farming
or something like the New domesticity movement, that being a provider,
being the person who's raising the food, raising the livestock,
knitting those hats, it doesn't have to be an oppressive act.
What's oppressive, a lot of these people argue, is participating
(23:47):
in a capitalist system that exploits workers. Yeah, and also
many would viably argue poisons the land and food as
well through the use of things like pesticides and if
you want to learn more, are about ecofeminism. We've done
an entire podcast all about that, so we're not going
to get into the nuts and bolts of it, but
(24:07):
you can find that podcast over at stuff Mom Never
Told You dot com. But we do want to mention
briefly the women's land movement of the nineteen seventies, and
that is women with a Y, because these were radical
feminists who formed separatist agricultural communities, including places like yellow
(24:27):
Hammer and Woman Share, as a way to fully liberate
themselves from the patriarchy. And again, there is a great
piece on this in Modern Farmer, my new favorite magazine,
not even Jumping, and it was fascinating to see how
there was It was radical feminism and also lesbianism combined
(24:50):
with agriculture. Some call this a take back the Land movement,
where these women really firmly believed that they needed it
to eradicate me in from their lives completely, whether that's
sexually or whether that is in like in any way
providing for their livelihood. They were like, we don't need you,
(25:10):
We're just gonna we're gonna take back the land. Essentially, Yeah,
but unlike a lot of farms today. I think the
focus was more on the act of separating themselves from
men and the traditional system of being with men depending
on men for providing, you know, of depending on those
big factory farms. The focus wasn't so much on the
(25:32):
actual farming itself, which I think is different from a
lot of today's farms where the farmer identity sort of
comes first. In a lot of cases, well, it's more
about the food as politics rather than the the food
coming second to politics and personal politics. Although they did
(25:53):
have their own Indian magazines and newsletters like Country Women,
which I wish I could still subscribe, And while they
were successful in demonstrating the fact that oh look, hey,
women can actually grow well some women, not me. Typically
women can actually grow plants, they can farm, they can
be successful growers. This movement, and this has been a
(26:15):
criticism of many parts of Second Way feminism. This movement
was mostly made up of white, middle class radical feminists,
and it highlights the racial disparity that still to some
extent exists within local food and c s A and
the farmers market movements. Yeah, I mean these a lot
(26:36):
of these women who were part of the land movement
met in liberal arts colleges. For instance, you're coming from
a privileged position when you in the background of saying cushi,
you're sort of higher education context. Separate yourself willfully and
pursue this kind of lifestyle, which which will directly contrast
(26:59):
actually what we're going to talk about in our next
podcast with Dolora Suerta and the Chicano civil rights movement
happening in California around the same time. But when you
look at your local CSA today, when you go to
your local farmers market today, there are lots of questions
that are being raised about who those farmers markets and
(27:23):
that wonderful organic sustainable agriculture is feeding. Because if you
look at lower income areas and areas that might have
higher concentrations of people of color, they are often in
food deserts. They don't have as much access, and the
food that we're talking about is often more expensive. It's
usually too expensive for me, Caroline, and it is important
(27:45):
to bring up these disparities that exist within things like
the organic food movement, within the farmers market movement and
the rise and farmers market popularity. But side note fun
fact to Schegee Professor Dr book or T. Watley's Pick
your Own Farms and Clientele membership Club's idea in the
early nineteen eighties was really what laid the groundwork for
(28:08):
C S a S. Though credit is usually attributed to
other people. Yeah, we read about that in Mother Earth
News and we wanted to mention it just because it
is an example of often the erasure of farmers of color,
which is what we wanted to talk about as well,
because black farmers make up just about two per cent
(28:30):
of the total farming population. And when it comes to
agriculture and people of color and we're talking about the
United States, no big surprise that there's been a lot
of structural racism embedded within the industries. I mean, going
back even pre slavery, just to the days of out
(28:52):
and outland theft from Native Americans taking their farmland to
then slavery and then share cropping in than today with
these massive agribusinesses and its reliance on immigrant labor, often
cheap and exploited immigrant labor, which again we'll get way
more into in our next episode. But so you can
(29:13):
understand then how it's sort of a complicated issue sometimes
when people of color want to come back and reclaim
that land because it's so deeply embedded. Our country's relationship
with people of color and agriculture is so deeply embedded. Well,
it's been something that families have tried to climb out
of and so for some people today it would seem
(29:36):
regressive to then want to go back and farm. And
in fact, I mean the relationship between farmers of color
in the U. S. Government is still a testy one
because many have filed civil suits against the U. S.
D A for receiving less government funding compared to white farmers.
So there are still questions of discrimination. And then when
(29:59):
we talk about women farmers of color, we have layers
of discrimination upon layers of discrimination. Yeah, but it's interesting
though that a greater proportion of women of color operate
farms than do white women. Because if you look back
to stats from fourteen percent of female principal farm operators
were African American versus twenty percent of them being Asian
(30:21):
and thirty percent were Native American compared to of female
principal farm operators who were white in twelve And because
of you know, the existence of this diversity, but at
the same time, still going back to our collective idea
of what a farmer looks like. It's old McDonald. It's
usually an older white gentleman with a pitchfork and a
(30:44):
plaid shirt and overalls and a little straw hat. Rd
an non attractor. Natasha Bowen's a k a. Brown Girl farming,
started blogging about diversity and farming and also started something
called the Color of Food Project to document the lives
and the crops of farmers of color around the United States. Yeah,
(31:08):
this was really interesting looking at women who, like you
said Kristen, felt almost compelled to leave rural areas, especially
in the Southeast, to leave those rural areas, leave that
history that is so the racial aspects intertwined with agriculture,
to leave that all behind. And then how when they
got older they realized, Know, what I want to do
(31:28):
is go back to the land, whether it's to whether
it's a political statement, or whether it's to really just
take care of my family or your community, like the
example of the woman in the Lower ninth Ward in
New Orleans starting a garden to feed that community. Yeah,
and if you look at Natasha bow and herself, she
has a really interesting take on farming and femininity because
(31:52):
She says that I've personally never felt more like a
woman then the first time I dug my hands into
the soil. And that's a statement that not align with
what society defines as feminine getting our hands dirty, writing tractors,
hurting cattle. So affirming that feminine identity with the land
and finding that solidarity while out on the road for
(32:12):
the Color of Food was so important to me. And
I love that because you really can argue that either
way that farming is super traditionally feminine, if we go
all the way back to hunter gatherers, men hunting, maybe
women gathering and farming um, or if you go all
the way to the other side and say that it's
it's totally unexpected, it's non traditional work for women well,
(32:36):
and for a lot of people, farming is radical as well.
A lot of what Bowen's has discovered and talked about
through the Color of Food project is the food justice movement,
that intersection of you know, providing this kind of healthy,
sustainable food for these communities that are usually not so
(33:00):
linked in with their local farmers markets um. And she
says that women are leading the food justice movement for
farm workers, and she calls out examples like the Coalition
of Immokali Workers in Florida, UM also women like Sorrujeriaman
of Roku United, the author of Behind the Kitchen Door
(33:22):
that talks about injustice of women working in the food
system's restaurant industry. She says, the impact is heavy on
every level from farm to table when it comes to
women in our overall food system, from seed to table.
And we're also seeing a rise in organizations like Southeastern
(33:43):
African American Farmers Organic Network that helped train and mentor
Black organic farmers. But it's interesting about that organization. While
it is certainly not focused solely on women, what people
within that organization have noticed is that more and more
people that they're dealing with are women. They're women farmers,
especially in the Southeast, who are seeking more resources, basically
(34:05):
more kind of like friends in the farming business. And
in addition to farmers of color organizing, getting more recognition
and really fighting for food justice and seeing those intersections
between identity politics and what is on our plates, we
also have to talk about LGBT farmers, who are another
(34:28):
group challenging the status quo of who can be a
farmer and what a farmer looks like. And this was
something that was really publicized on a more national level
by Jonah Mossburg's documentary out Here Yeah. The documentary highlighted
a queer grassroots farming movement around the country basically, and
(34:51):
for Mossburg, he said that living in a rural setting
really helped him to get more comfortable in his own skin.
He says that it made me feel strong, it made
me feel everyone else around me because Mossburg is a
trans farmer. And what's so interesting in listening to not
only what Mossburg has to say, but talking to other
(35:11):
farmers too, is that he makes it clear that sort
of the farming identity is almost above everything else, and
that when you are farming, when you've got your hands
in the dirt, when you're in touch with the land
or you know the animals that you're raising, it's almost
kind of an equalizer. And so I love this idea
that we saw in a couple of different places about
(35:31):
how minority farmers, whether you're a woman, a woman of color,
uh an LGBT farmer, you're you're queering the farming system
and that it's less about being gay, being lesbian, being
a trans farmer, and so much more about just being
almost an unexpected farmer, being an outsider who's working to
change that industry. Well, and we probably don't think of
(35:55):
rural America as necessarily being a safe space for l
g b t Q individuals, but Mossburg told Bitch magazine,
and this was also echoed by other farmers that you
talked to in out here. He said, quote, I think
small scale sustainable agriculture is inherently a logical and safe
place for queer people because it's a place where we
(36:17):
can enact and practice our queer values. And a lot
of times in those farming communities, it seems like from
the people that they've talked to, it's more about the
connection to the land and the animals and what you
are harvesting that often is more more of a focal
(36:38):
point than who you are, if that makes sense. But
it seems like the common thread through all of these
different groups of people is that they're bringing different perspectives
to farming and how important that is. I mean, just
like we talked about getting different perspectives in any industry,
in any line of work, and and what a difference
(36:59):
that different types of people can make, especially when it
comes to our own health and the food that we
put in our bodies. Yeah. And I was really hardened
to see as well that the U s D the
U s d A has been supporting that queering of
the farm system. Is Mossburg put it because it and
the National Center for Lesbian Rights now host a rural
(37:20):
pride campaign, which is great. And can I just mention
my favorite quote from Mossburg Um in which a bitch
asked what the queerest vegetable was and he said, it's
not rainbow charred. Everybody always says rainbow chart. There is,
in fact, um an lgbt Q farming group out in
(37:41):
the San Francisco Bay area that I think is called
the rainbow Chart Coalition. Um, he says it's not that.
He thinks it's silariac. Yeah, and maybe you want to
go buy it immediately, I know his description of cooking
with it. I was like, oh man, I need to
get my boyfriend to cook with this. And what a
how There there was also um a goat farmer who
(38:03):
runs a farm called like Sassy Nanny's or something like
that and makes incredible cheese. It was great to just
see all these profiles of you know, these lgbt Q farmers,
these farmers of color, these women farmers, all of these
people who are reclaiming land in their own ways, and
also considering, Caroline, how much it contrasts my day today,
(38:26):
highly urbanized life, and imagining what what a joy that
pace must be like. Not I mean, they're waking up
a lot earlier than I am, I'm sure, and farming
is not easy by any means, um, But just to
think about how much those people that we've been talking
(38:49):
about and reading about appreciate the land and what they
do so much, um economy me want to go be
a farmer to be honest. Yeah, I mean there was
there was an attitude kind of in in several of
the people we read about who were sort of opting
out of that that urban uh nine to five lifestyle,
(39:11):
who were pursuing something different, whether it was for political
reasons or purely personal, wanting to get back in touch
with a more quote unquote a more natural way of living,
of of living off the land, and just just fascinating
to see how that idea of what a farmer looks
like is absolutely changing. So I really hope there are
(39:34):
some farmers listening urban farmers, community gardeners. I don't care
if you can grow plants. Hey, you're a farmer in
our books. We want to hear from you though. Mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
UM and any thoughts on sustainable agriculture, food deserts, food
justice and this idea of queering our food system. Let
(39:57):
us know all of your thoughts. Mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com again is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom stuff Podcasts or messages
on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break. So I have a letter here about our
episode on passive aggressive behavior. And you know, in the episode,
(40:21):
we pointed out that the stereotype is that for women
are passive aggressive than men, that it's totally a woman thing,
but that in reality it's way more of a kind
of fifty split. And so we have a letter here
from Brittany kind of talking about that. She says, just
wanted to say a great job on the passive aggressive
episode of the podcast. When I first saw the title,
(40:43):
I thought, oh yeah, I definitely think it's more gendered
towards females, but as you discussed it, I actually felt
like my husband fit a lot of these categories, but
in different ways. I can't believe the term, oh, I'm
only kidding never came up. We've had so many conversations
about this in my relationship. I feel like my husband
(41:04):
is constantly teasing or giving smart slash harsh remarks in
the name of humor, and now I'm wondering if that's
just his version of being passive aggressive. For what it's worth,
he claims it's a remnant of his time in the military,
which ties him perfectly to the beginning of that episode.
I think girl on girl passive aggressiveness maybe more common
(41:25):
than male on male passive aggression, but I would argue
that when it comes to straight CIS gender relationships between
males and females, both platonic and romantic, they're equally full
of passive aggressiveness on both sides, even if it displays differently,
perhaps because of ingrained beliefs in physical power discrepancies. Question Mark,
(41:46):
thanks for the podcast and thanks for all you do,
and thank you Brittany Well, Caroline. I have a letter here,
also from a Brittany, and it's on our o c
D podcast, um and Brittany writes, I wanted to share
my youngest brother's story. He was completely quote normal as
a young child, and suddenly, when he was about thirteen
(42:06):
or fourteen, he began to exhibit intense, typically O c
D like symptoms. He washed his hands to the point
that they cracked in blood. He would only use one
bathroom out of the four in my parents home because
he felt he that was the only clean one, even
though my parents got a very clean house. After taking
him to the therapist for months with no results and
(42:27):
in fact worsening symptoms, my frustrated mom resorted to researching
his symptoms for self and came across a rare syndrome
called PANDOUS, which stands for pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated
with streptococcal infections. Basically, it's a mouthful that means kids
who have had strepped sometimes develop an autoimmune reaction to
(42:50):
the bacteria, which causes their immune system to begin attacking
their brains, leading to symptoms that can look like O
c D or other psychiatric disorders. It turns out that
existence of pandas is not agreed upon in the medical community.
And my brother's pediatrician wouldn't take my mother's inquiry about
it seriously. My mom didn't give up there, however, and
went to locate an immunologists slash PANDAS specialist a few
(43:14):
hours away. In one visit, the specialist confirmed my brother's
diagnosis as PANDAS rather than true O c D. He
was prescribed a heavy round of antibiotics to kill off
the strap bacteria. Within a week of taking the antibiotics,
my brother's symptoms were noticeably improved, and within a month
he was back to normal. I just wanted to share
this in case it might be helpful to other listeners,
(43:35):
especially since PANDAS can mask itself as O c D,
but is in fact very rare and hard to diagnose.
So thanks for the heads of Brittany, and thanks to
everybody who's written into us Mom seven House. Stuffworks dot
Com is where you can send us your letters and
links to all of our social media as well as
all of our blogs, videos and podcasts, including this one
(43:56):
with our sources so you can see all of these
modern farmer articles I am now obsessed with. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works? Dot com
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com