A profound shift is occurring among women working in agriculture-they are increasingly seeing themselves asfarmers, not only as the wives or daughters of farmers. The authors draw on more than a ...decade of research to document and analyze the reasons for the transformation. As their sense of identity changes, many female farmers are challenging the sexism they face in their chosen profession. In this book, farm women in the northeastern United States describe how they got into farming and became successful entrepreneurs despite the barriers they encountered in agricultural institutions, farming communities, and even their own families. Their strategies for obtaining land and labor and developing successful businesses offer models for other aspiring farmers.Pulling down the barriers that women face requires organizations and institutions to become informed by what the authors call a feminist agrifood systems theory (FAST). This framework values women's ways of knowing and working in agriculture: emphasizing personal, economic, and environmental sustainability, creating connections through the food system, and developing networks that emphasize collaboration and peer-to-peer education. The creation and growth of a specific organization, the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network, offers a blueprint for others seeking to incorporate a feminist agrifood systems approach into agricultural programming. The theory has the potential to shift how farmers, agricultural professionals, and anyone else interested in farming think about gender and sustainability, as well as to change how feminist scholars and theorists think about agriculture.
Social support could be a powerful weight‐loss treatment moderator or mediator but is rarely assessed. We assessed the psychometric properties, initial levels, and predictive validity of a measure of ...perceived social support and sabotage from friends and family for healthy eating and physical activity (eight subscales). Overweight/obese women randomized to one of two 6‐month, group‐based behavioral weight‐loss programs (N = 267; mean BMI 32.1 ± 3.5; 66.3% White) completed subscales at baseline, and weight loss was assessed at 6 months. Internal consistency, discriminant validity, and content validity were excellent for support subscales and adequate for sabotage subscales; qualitative responses revealed novel deliberate instances not reflected in current sabotage items. Most women (>75%) “never” or “rarely” experienced support from friends or family. Using nonparametric classification methods, we identified two subscales—support from friends for healthy eating and support from family for physical activity—that predicted three clinically meaningful subgroups who ranged in likelihood of losing ≥5% of initial weight at 6 months. Women who “never” experienced family support were least likely to lose weight (45.7% lost weight) whereas women who experienced both frequent friend and family support were more likely to lose weight (71.6% lost weight). Paradoxically, women who “never” experienced friend support were most likely to lose weight (80.0% lost weight), perhaps because the group‐based programs provided support lacking from friendships. Psychometrics for support subscales were excellent; initial support was rare; and the differential roles of friend vs. family support could inform future targeted weight‐loss interventions to subgroups at risk.
To explore how youth, parents, and grandparents discuss issues related to eating healthfully and unhealthfully and to identify intergenerational strategies for educators to improve this ...communication.
In three intergenerational focus groups, each with 4-8 families, a trained moderator asked questions about family practices and conversations for eating healthfully and unhealthfully.
Three focus group sites, each with Pennsylvania Nutrition Education Program sites (PANEP) programs serving low-income populations and multigenerational clientele, based in geographically and culturally diverse communities in Pennsylvania.
Forty-four individuals (21 pre-teens, 16 parents, and 7 grandparents) from 17 families.
How youth, parents, and grandparents discuss and influence each other’s healthful and unhealthful eating practices.
“Strength” of evidence determined by repetition of ideas across focus groups and from the respondents’ quotes providing in-depth information.
Families demonstrated a wide range of ways that family communication is associated with the adoption of healthful and unhealthful patterns of eating. Parents and grandparents expressed anguish over their struggle and inability to help their children eat more healthfully. All three generations enumerated strategies for dealing with disagreement.
Grandparents, parents and children indicate that they need opportunities to learn together and communicate about ways to improve nutrition behaviors.
The identities of women on farms are shifting as more women enter farming and identify as farmers, as reflected by the 30 percent growth in women farmers in the U.S. census of agriculture (USDA ...2009). This article draws from identity theory to develop a quantitative measure of the identities of farm women. The measure incorporates multiple roles farming women may perform and weights these roles by their salience to two farm identities, farm operator and farm partner. We use a sample of women on farms (n = 810) in the northeastern United States to assess the measures of role identity in relation to reported decision‐making authority, farm tasks, and farm and individual characteristics. The findings provide a multidimensional view of farming women in the northeastern United States, a far more complex view than traditional survey research has previously captured. This research provides a measure that other researchers can use to assess the multiple and shifting identities of farming women in other sections of the United States.
Civic agriculture is characterized in the literature as complementary and embedded social and economic strategies that provide economic benefits to farmers at the same time that they ostensibly ...provide socio-environmental benefits to the community. This paper presents some ways in which women farmers practice civic agriculture. The data come from in-depth interviews with women practicing agriculture in Pennsylvania. Some of the strategies women farmers use to make a living from the farm have little to do with food or agricultural products, but all are a product of the process of providing a living for farmers while meeting a social need in the community. Most of the women in our study also connect their business practices to their gender identity in rural and agricultural communities, and redefine successful farming in opposition to traditional views of economic rationality.
Women farmers are underserved in agricultural education and technical assistance. Long held social constructions of farming women as ‘farmwives’ and in some cases ‘the bookkeepers’ rather than ...farmers or decision-makers influence the direction of most educational programming delivered through extension programs in land-grant universities in the United States. Consequently, many women farmers generally view these spaces as hostile, rather than helpful environments. This paper uses the agricultural training framework developed by Liepins and Schick (1998) to analyze our research on developing educational programming for women farmers. We conducted five focus groups with members of the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network (PA-WAgN) to better understand women farmers’ needs for education. Women farmers reported the kinds of knowledge and information they want, in what kinds of contexts, and through what means of communication. We adapt and extend the original theoretical framework developed by Liepins and Schick to incorporate the seriality of women's identities, their discourses of embodiment and the agency granted to them through social networks. Through a presentation of the results of these focus groups, we discuss both the relevance of gender to agricultural education and the importance of the network model in providing education to women farmers.
Women are the fastest growing segment of farm operators in the United States, comprising approximately 14% of principal operators and 30% of all operators of the nation's 2.2 million farms. Although ...several studies have examined the adoption of conservation practices by farmers, no study of which we are aware has focused on the use of conservation practices among women farmers in the US. Therefore, in 2008, we conducted a survey of women farmers in the Northeast US to better understand their use of conservation practices, and how their use is affected by demographic and farm characteristics, and membership in agricultural organizations and networks. We examined the practices related to the type of agricultural organizations, including commodity producer organizations, general farm organizations, women's groups associated with general farm or commodity organizations, farm women's organizations, and sustainable/organic agriculture organizations. Over 85% of the 815 respondents belonged to at least one organization. The most common organizations reported were sustainable/organic agriculture organizations (53.5%) and general farm organizations (50.8%). About one-third of respondents belonged to commodity-based organizations. The states with organized women farmers' networks—Pennsylvania, Maine and Vermont—represented more than half of them. Members of women's and sustainable or organic agriculture organizations tended to be younger, have less farming experience, and to have received more formal agricultural education than did members of commodity-based, general farm and women's agricultural groups within general farm organizations. Our results indicate that organizational membership and participation provide critical networks that support and reinforce the use of conservation practices. Some practices were positively associated with one type of organization while negatively associated with others. For example, compost production/application, crop rotation, manure incorporation, and organic crop and livestock production are more likely among members of sustainable/organic agriculture organizations, but less likely among members of general farm organizations. The converse is true for integrated pest management (IPM) on crop farms. Specific conservation practices had unique sets of variables linked to their use, with farm products being the most frequent predictors. This research serves as a baseline to understand the array of conservation practices used by women farmers in the Northeast US, and some factors associated with their use. The results suggest the need for consideration of the applicability of existing adoption models for women farmers. As women tend to have diversified operations with multiple markets, educational and regulatory programs that attempt to reach women farmers may need to consider the specific types of farms they operate to best match practices to their situations and goals.
Cooperative extension, as an outreach mechanism of land grant universities in the USA, has long served the educational needs of rural and agricultural communities. The educational programming of ...extension, however, is generally divided into areas that reflect, reify and reinforce the gendered division of labour on farms in the USA. While it is well documented that extension inadequately serves women in providing knowledge about production practices in contemporary agriculture, the mechanisms by which women's access to knowledge is hindered are not well understood. Using Freire's ideas about authentic educational subjects we explore the social construction of authentic farming and educational programming in the cooperative extension system. Using interviews with extension educators at a large land grant university, this article describe how extension educators identify certain types of farmers and farming as authentic, while certain types of farms are seen as inauthentic. This belief feeds into the institutional discourse that the educational opportunities offered by extension are appropriate for all audiences of authentic farmers. We conclude by offering insights into how cooperative extension can reorient its programming toward the emerging cultural economies of agriculture in rural communities.
The study reported here assessed the farm safety and health training needs of beginning farmers in Pennsylvania to help educators develop training workshops and materials to meet those needs. Results ...of the online survey indicate that participants highly value farm safety, consider themselves to have mostly minimal to moderate skills relative to the safe operation of farms, and are willing to attend safety training workshops. The results of the study provide direction to Extension educators in designing farm safety and health training for this growing constituent group.
Abstract
The identities of women on farms are shifting as more women enter farming and identify as farmers, as reflected by the 30 percent growth in women farmers in the
U
.
S
. census of agriculture ...(USDA 2009). This article draws from identity theory to develop a quantitative measure of the identities of farm women. The measure incorporates multiple roles farming women may perform and weights these roles by their salience to two farm identities, farm operator and farm partner. We use a sample of women on farms (
n
= 810) in the northeastern
U
nited
S
tates to assess the measures of role identity in relation to reported decision‐making authority, farm tasks, and farm and individual characteristics. The findings provide a multidimensional view of farming women in the northeastern
U
nited
S
tates, a far more complex view than traditional survey research has previously captured. This research provides a measure that other researchers can use to assess the multiple and shifting identities of farming women in other sections of the
U
nited
S
tates.
PDF
