LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

By Elizabeth Henderson, Liza Gabriel, and the entire TNF Advisory Committee

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Celebrating the International Year of the Woman Farmer

"The first thing we have to do is to admit that we are in a crisis. We are in a mess. And we are in it together... One would like to think that it would not be necessary to write any more about 'saving the earth.' One would like to think that such things would be taken for granted." Wendell Berry

 

This was written more than 50 years ago, and it’s disgraceful that it's so relevant today. Our crises are many - the climate emergency, the eternal wars, the rise of authoritarianism, the current administration's “DEI” purge of female-identified people, USDA rescinding “socially disadvantaged” assistance in grant, loan, and research programs, etc, and so forth. We know them too well. 

 

For as far back in history as we know, female-identified people have saved seeds, planted, harvested, prepared, and served much of the food that humans eat. However, in the modern capitalist, industrialized food system, farmers are men. Women have had to insist that women on farms be counted, and that women can count as farmers.  

 

The great American farmer image of a large white man on a big tractor with a little white woman at home keeping the books and changing the diapers is an agrarian myth. Binary. Eternal. Epic. 

 

Yet, on almost every farm, even the most industrialized, women play essential roles that keep the farm going. Close to 90% of US farms stay in business because of someone's off-farm work, often the wife of the “farmer.” And more farms all the time are managed by women without a male counterpart, as well as by people who do not define themselves according to this binary structure. Even the American Farm Bureau is recognizing the role of women with the release of a study of 4,300 women throughout the US and Puerto Rico, which concludes “Agriculture around the world has flourished with the full support of women — oftentimes behind the scenes — but increasingly in leadership roles.” 

 

In industrial agriculture, what is valued is what can be given a price tag, monetized, counted as return on investment, banked as profit. Yet agriculture depends for its existence on things that have no monetary value. How do you put a dollar value on the microorganisms in healthy soil? On the rain? On the tender attention of the person who cooks the meals that feed the farmer? On the community of people who rush to help in a crisis? 

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Organic farming is caught in the tension between nature and the profit system. If we were to isolate organic farming from the context of US agriculture, it would not occur to us to dedicate a full issue to highlighting women's contributions. So many of the leaders of the organic movement and a majority of the people doing the work on community-scale organic farms are women. The Principles of Organic Agriculture – ecology, health, care, and fairness – are values that mainstream culture identifies as ‘feminine.’  

 

These are, of course, humanist values, based on human rights. But we have to look at things in terms of the history we're living through, where, throughout the world, most women still have very little say over their lives, and most of agriculture is dominated by men and machines. The positive values for change almost always come from below, from the people who are more oppressed. Highlighting outdated systems of oppression and celebrating stories of prosperity is why we dedicate a whole TNF issue to women. It’s why we’ve dedicated whole issues to migrant laborers (Summer 2023), to Black farmers (Winter 2024), and a future issue to LGBTQAI+ farmers (Summer 2027). 

 

We devote this special issue to women in agriculture because agroecological agriculture, rooted in values that women have long centered, is the alternative to the industrial, capitalist, monocrop, everything-for-profit food system we want to transform.

 

“I think we need a much deeper dive looking at the entire future of agriculture in this country. That includes immigration and social justice, loss of agricultural land, the move to mechanization and AI for labor, and everything else that’s at a really huge turning point. We’re already in it and we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg...”

Jeannie Economos, Farmworker Association of Florida

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