In honor of Women’s History Month, our next podcast features Audra Mulkern, founder of The Female Farmer Project and forthcoming documentary film project Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers. Mulkern also hosts a podcast dedicated to featuring female farmers and providing a way for them to share their stories, struggles, and successes.
The project offers female farmers a platform for sharing their stories while also honoring the critical role that women have played in food production throughout history, which is a story often cast to the wayside. The reasons for the discrepancy between female and male food producers are many, from the antiquated assumption that male children will inherit the farm over female children to a tendency among women to be less outspoken about our achievements.
Although the average farmer in the US is a white male in his late fifties, the 2017 Census of Agriculture noted something unique about female farmers. Today, 29.13% of farms are women-led compared to only 13.6% percent in 2012. The overall number of female farmers has also increased during that period from 31.5% to 36%. This means that there are more than 500,000 women leading farming operations across the country and 250,000 new women farmers since 2012. Now, 56% of farms have at least one woman participating in the operation.
So what role are women playing when it comes to producing food? It’s hard to tell based on data from the Census of Agriculture. The document asks farmers to identify the principal producer of the farm, which is defined as the person who makes the day-to-day management decisions. As Mulkern notes in the podcast, the USDA made changes to the Census form that now allows for four names to be listed for each operation instead of only one.
Just because someone isn’t listed as the principal producer, however, doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t playing a critical role and making necessary contributions to the overall operation. Roughly 78% of female producers who responded to the survey reported that they are involved with making day-to-day decisions.
The area of agriculture where women appear to be making the most impact, however, is the beef industry. According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, beef cattle operations reported the highest number of female principal producers (229,000) and the most non-principal female producers (355,000). There is still progress to be made, however. The data also shows that farms with female principal producers tend to be smaller than average in both acres and value of production.
Through her work, Mulkern has had the opportunity to learn more about the many different women who are drawn to agriculture today. From women taking on multi-generational farming operations to women becoming first-generation farmers, there are countless opportunities throughout the food system for female voices to make a difference. Despite their varying backgrounds, they all face a similar set of challenges: poor access to land and credit, discrimination from private and public institutions, and a lack of childcare. Unfortunately, many women who work in the US agriculture industry are also subject to sexual harassment.
On top of these barriers, women are often treated differently by their male colleagues in agriculture. As eighth-generation Tennessee farmer Lorie Fleenor told
