This launched O’Brien’s agriculture
activism: balancing farming, raising children and serving as a national advocate and spokeswoman for women in agriculture in an ecological and just food system. In 1997, she launched the Women, Food and Ag Network to collectively advocate for a stronger voice. “Throughout history, women in agriculture have been relegated to providing assistance, rather than making decisions,” O’Brien explains. “It’s up to us as women to collaboratively support each other while challenging the system.”
Cultivating Change For her 50th birthday, Paula Foreman gave her life a new chapter. She launched her midlife “second act” in 2007 with Encore Farm, a name that serves as a rallying mantra for her peers. “The name is a tribute declaring that fresh starts and new beginnings can happen at any age,” explains Foreman, now an urban farmer in St. Paul, Minnesota. Embodying this business moxie, she chose to
specialize, producing one thing very well: organic dried beans. Relinda Walker, of Walker Organic
Farms, outside Savannah, Georgia, represents a cadre of “boomerang” farmers; women that return to the land to continue a family farm with a commitment to organics. Like many farm kids, after college, Walker left to pursue a corporate career in the city. Then the 9/11 terror attack shifted her priorities. “All roads led me to coming back home and growing food,” she says. Launched in 2005, Walker’s farm was one of southern Georgia’s fi rst organic operations, yielding specialty varieties like rainbow carrots in vivid shades of purple, orange and red.
Future Femme Power Young women in their 20s and 30s are adding energy, diversity, vibrancy and fresh outlooks to the female farming movement. Lindsey Morris Carpenter runs Grassroots Farm, in Monroe, Wisconsin, a diversifi ed operation of certifi ed-organic vegetables and pastured livestock, in partnership with her mother, Gail Carpenter.
“A crucial key to farming happiness is being a good neighbor,” she shares. “I call around when I see livestock and pets outside of fences; maintain my fences; share my garlic and potato seed; and always invite neighbors to parties and events, even though they may not attend. Even if others’ personal lifestyle and farming philosophies are radical opposites, we still have our physical location and appreciation of nature in common, and that’s big.” “The women farmer movement is just a toddler,” sums up O’Brien. “We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet, especially with representation on the national leadership platform.” It’s easy to support female growers at local farmers’ markets. Cultivating change can be rewarding—and tasty.
Lisa Kivirist is the author of the new book Soil Sisters: A Toolkit for Women Farmers and a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. Her family runs the energy-independent Inn Serendipity Farm and B&B, in southwestern Wisconsin.
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