Women have always made essential contributions to U.S. farming operations, but official methodologies seeking to comprehensively account for their roles and experiences havre only emerged in the last 15 years. The U.S. Census of Agriculture first collected data on secondary and tertiary farm operators in 2002, making visible the significant presence of women in farming, and enabling more in-depth research on their characteristics and the economic challenges they face. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of women in U.S. farming, and compare their changing position relative to male farmers over time. Specifically, we address the following research questions: How have the numbers and socio-demographic profile of the nation’s women farmers changed since the 2002 Census of Agriculture? In what geographic regions do women farmers have their strongest presence? How have economic disparities between farms operated by women and men evolved over this time period? And to what extent can structural forces such as rural demographic change, economic recession and recovery, and consolidation in the agricultural sector help explain these trends? We explore these questions through a comparative longitudinal analysis of women and men farmers using Census of Agriculture data from 2002, 2007, and 2012.
Preliminary results show that the total number of women farm operators has moderately increased from 27% to 30% between 2002 and 2012. From 2002 to 2007, the number of women principal farm operators grew by 29%, but from 2007 to 2012 it dropped by 5.9% – a greater decline than seen for male primary farm operators. A majority of women farm operators are white, followed by American Indian and Hispanic women. They are present in the most significant numbers in the Southwest and New England, and least represented in the Midwest, suggesting their exclusion from highly capitalized grain farming. Women-operated farms face an economic disadvantage in comparison to male-operated farms, as measured by farm size, land holdings, agricultural sales, and government payments received. Thus, we hypothesize that the 2008 recession impacted woman-owned farms disproportionately (Sachs et al., 2016: 2), causing their recent decline in numbers. However, with the subsequent economic recovery and continued growth of global food markets, the 2017 Census of Agriculture may find a return to earlier, rising trends in their numbers.
This research makes several important contributions to the literature on U.S. women farmers. To our knowledge, it is the first scholarly paper to conduct an in-depth analysis of women farmers in the U.S. over time, to compare changing numbers and economic conditions of women and men farmers, and to analyze the structural conditions that could be driving these trends. Second, while the literature on farm women has often focused on those engaged in sustainable farming (e.g. Sachs et al, 2016), we bring attention to the experiences of the far greater numbers of women farmers engaged in the conventional sector. Finally, we discuss changes in the 2017 Census methodology to better account for women’s roles on farms, and present some key questions for analysis once this data becomes available in 2018.
