Quick: What image comes to mind when you read the word “farmer”? Perhaps you envision a sturdy and stoic gentleman, clad in work boots, overalls, and a straw hat, holding a pitchfork or driving a tractor.
Ingrained as it is in the Western consciousness, the classic stereotype of the farmer is quickly shifting across the country, as an increasing number of women are getting out in the
fields, growing crops, and managing large-scale agricultural operations.
Nationwide, the number of female farmers has risen nearly 30 percent since 2002. In Santa Barbara County, according to the most recent U.S. Census of Agriculture, there were 738 female farm operators in 2007. That figure was up from the 632 counted in 2002. In 2007, women were the primary operators of 311 county farms, up from 154 in 2002.
So it was a sign of the times, perhaps, that the county’s 2010 Farmer of the Year was a woman: Judy Lundberg, president and CEO of Babé Farms in Santa Maria.
Tops in her field
Judy Lundberg was born into agriculture. Years ago, her father ran a 175-acre ranch in Santa Maria, and up until she graduated high school, Lundberg worked in the fields, hoeing beans in the summer.
“When you work a farm or ranch with your husband or dad, you kind of learn it all,” Lundberg said. “You just absorb it, and when it’s necessary, you just sort of step up and find you’ve done most of it at one time or another.”
In 1986, Lundberg and her husband, Frank, partnered with Will Souza to open Babé Farms, and Judy worked on the ranch doing bookkeeping and payroll. Souza retired, and Frank passed away in 2003 from lung cancer. Knowing the farm was worth fighting for, Judy and her son Jeff decided to take over.
“It’s just he and I against the world,” Lundberg said. “I obviously would’ve rather had my husband here and running the company, but when he passed away, we had to step up, because you don’t sell a company like this. It was something you had to keep going, and a lot of people depended on us.”
Babé Farms, which celebrated 25 years in March, has discovered its niche. Today, Judy and Jeff manage the farm’s 1,400 acres of specialty and baby vegetables. They grow carrots, radishes, beets, and lettuce, to name a few. Lundberg takes care of operations and the farm’s 140 full-time employees, while Jeff handles the production side.
“It was kind of a natural thing,” Lundberg said. “I was always on the ranch. I drove my share of tractors and worked in the fields. I did it all at one time or another, and I’ve enjoyed the good with the bad. I just wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Though Lundberg said gender has never been a barrier to her success, she said the perception of female farmers has changed dramatically from when she first started making the rounds at agricultural conventions.
“I’d go to these shows, and they’d assume if I was there I was somebody’s wife, doing the wife tour, instead of being involved in the symposiums,” she said. “But it’s grown. I’ve been in these shows enough now that they know who I am.”
Lundberg still works every day and goes out in the fields regularly with her son. Though the job requires long, often odd hours, she said it’s gratifying to see the end result.
“It’s hard work, but you definitely reap the rewards,” she said. “You see the results, and you have freedom so that if you get your work done and you want to go with your family somewhere, you can go.”
A scaled-down approach
When it comes to the role women play in agriculture today, Lundberg is the exception, not the rule. According to Santa Barbara County’s Farm Bureau, most women new to the industry are small-scale organic farmers.
Brean Bettencourt, a fruit science senior at Cal Poly in SLO, explained that women are particularly drawn to organic farming because the care and upkeep required involves more attention to detail and a meticulous nature. Women tend to be more perfectionistic, she said, making small-scale organic farming a perfect fit.
For many women starting out, she said, the single biggest driving force is the knowledge the food is coming from a trusted source.
“You’re going to think, ‘Well, I want these healthy, nutritious choices for my family, and I also want to provide those to other people,’” Bettencourt said. “It’s not just about me and my family, it’s bigger than that.”
In Santa Maria, Alejandra Mahoney owns Blosser Urban Garden along with her husband Jerry, a third-generation farmer and farm manager at the Cal Poly Organic Farm. The couple once had a large 250-acre farm, but decided one day they wanted to grow only organics.
“For us, it was important that our kids were raised in a healthy environment,” Mahoney said. “We felt it was a good change to go to organic, so we didn’t have to worry about them on the farm, and we could do it more as a family.”
The Mahoneys sold their produce at farmers markets in San Francisco and L.A., but realized a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program would be a better way to get food to their neighbors. In a CSA, members subscribe to a farm, collecting boxes of fruits and vegetables grown and harvested there.
So the couple scaled their operation way down—first to 100 acres, and then to just three. Their urban farm, managed by Alejandra, now feeds 60 families.
“It’s really physical, hard work,” she said. “Even loading trucks to go to farmers markets or things that don’t seem like they’d really be that hard, become really hard at 4 o’clock in the morning.”
Unlike many CSAs with long-term contracts,
Blosser Urban Garden’s members can sign up for just one week, monthly, or for the whole growing season. With the program, Mahoney said she’s following her passion: feeding people.
“What women bring is a reality about what we want to feed our families,” Mahoney said. “Organically, it’s not a scary place for women anymore, it’s a really empowering place, and having women on the farm gives it a totally different feel. It becomes more about food than produce.”
While farming is still very much a men’s club in the Santa Maria Valley, Mahoney said, there’s much to be hopeful for as more women get interested in agriculture and incorporate it into family life.
“Women are really changing the face of demand. Now women are saying we want better food in the schools, we want our children to have more organic options,” she said. “It’s not so much that your husband is a farmer and works out on the farm, but you might actually live out on the farm, you might actually harvest, so women are taking a more active role. And I think it’s amazing that it’s taken so long, because we are the consumers.”
Just miles from Mahoney’s urban garden, Ariela Gottschalk manages the Growing Grounds Farm along with two other women. Growing Grounds is a nonprofit horticultural therapy program for people with mental illnesses, run by the Transitions-Mental Health Association.
On six acres, the farm grows all sorts of crops, from carrots and tomatoes to eggplant and potatoes, as well as cut flowers. Gottschalk teaches farming techniques, and many of her students have little to no growing experience.
“You learn something new every day, and you learn new ways to do it better,” she said. “First you have to learn which part of the plant goes in the ground and which part goes up, and the difference between the root and a leaf. If you can do that, you can pretty much be a farmer.”
Like many in the new generation of female farmers, Gottschalk didn’t come from a farming family—and she’s lately noticed more and more women just like her.
“They’re interested in it because they’re interested in a more healthy way to farm—the idea of living off the land, digging in the dirt and being more connected in that sense,” she said. “I think people are looking for that antidote to the nature deficit disorder that we experience.”
Gottschalk said she’s not interested in large-scale farming, where it’s more about machines and muscle.
“There are some things that it’s nice to have a man around to do,” she said with a chuckle. “I don’t think women are as into sitting on a tractor for eight hours. There are some out there, but I’m definitely not one.”
The new breed
These days, especially on smaller farms, women are getting involved in the sales and marketing of agriculture, using their unique skills to change the way the industry communicates.
“Women bring people to the farm because that’s what women do. We share,” Blosser Urban Garden’s Mahoney said. “We want to share our experience, and we want to share our food. On our Facebook and our website, we share recipes and comments, so we bring more communication and involvement to the farm.”
According to Cal Poly’s Bettencourt, who authors a blog about food production, there’s recently been a boom in young, college-educated women who’ve adapted new technological media to traditional agriculture.
“The way we communicate is changing, and for one reason or another, women are more in tune with that, and that also plays a role in agriculture,” she said. “There’s so many women who are starting blogs, and they’re very well followed.”
The shift in ag can be seen most strikingly on college campuses. In the past, finding women in agriculture classes was a rarity; today, several educators in the industry say most classrooms are split evenly between males and females.
According to Megan Rietkerk, a Cal Poly graduate with a masters degree in ag student education, women used to be only in administrative positions, but now they’re moving to more detail-oriented research careers.
Educators say an increasing number of young women are pursuing food and crop sciences, nutrition, and horticulture. On the Central Coast, it’s common for women to go into winemaking and end up working for vineyards. In recent years, there’s also been a surge of females working toward becoming licensed pest control advisors.
However, Rietkirk said, several types of farming jobs remain stratified.
“[In] some industries it’s still hard for women to be 100 percent involved in, if it’s a male-dominated industry and they’re running labor crews and stuff like that,” Rietkerk said. “Sometimes they don’t want to advance a woman in that, because there might be conflict or something might happen. They fear for them.”
For many young girls, a first contact with agriculture comes through 4-H and Future Farmers of America (FFA) programs in high schools. The FFA didn’t even allow women until 1969, and now, according to Rietkerk, girls outnumber boys in most FFA chapters.
“I think a lot of women are stepping up and realizing that it’s OK to be in agriculture,” she said.
According to FFA members, many young women are drawn to the organization in order to gain leadership skills and improve their public speaking ability.
“They say that agriculture has shifted—I think it’s 60-40 percent girls to guys,” said Sarah Rayburn, a FFA member and junior at Righetti High School. “It’s a majority [of] women these days, and I hope to be a large-animal vet, so agriculture is going to continue in my lifestyle.”
Santa Maria High’s FFA chapter, one of the largest in the state, currently has about 500 members, split evenly by gender. With no family background in farming, Santa Maria senior Thalia Reyes joined FFA because of the organization’s commitment to making leaders through its agricultural programs and quickly found a love for the industry.
“It definitely made me realize more about what agriculture is, how much it takes to learn where our food really comes from, and the struggles that past farmers went through to be able to have what we do today,” she said.
With an interest in vegetables, Reyes said she now plans on pursuing a career in the agricultural industry after high school.
“Most of the leaders in our chapter are girls,” Reyes said. “It’s inspirational.”
FFA member and fellow Santa Maria High senior Ana Jacobo called joining the organization a “life-changing experience,” and said she’s come face-to-face with traditional farming stereotypes.
“I’ve been told ‘a girl shouldn’t be out there with those animals’ … .” Jacobo said. “But I think a lot of people who aren’t involved in agricultural industry don’t believe it’s a girl’s place, just because they see it as tough man work—but you get used to it.
“I think that if a girl thinks agriculture isn’t their place, they should realize there’s a lot of different aspects to it,” she added. “Yeah, some of it is getting dirty, but it’s fun, it’s enjoyable, and it’s a big part of our lives, and I don’t think someone should be influenced to not be part of it just because of their sex.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 19-26, 2011.