News and Reviews

By Dr. Oliver Moore

“I think about conventional large-scale industrial farming with its focus on high yields as masculine and small-scale organic farming with its focus on family, community and connections as feminine. I’ve done a lot of research about gender and farming and it seems like women are well suited to small-scale agriculture. Women do the majority of the grocery shopping and feeding families and communities is a big focus for them”.

That’s according to an organic grower in Canada, Robin Tunnicliffe, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. She part runs a co-operative farm near Vancouver, where she also studies the theory of organic farming.

So, is organic farming more feminine than mainstream or conventional farming?

A few different ways to try to figure this out.

First up, organic farms are more feminine in personnel. These is no academic research I’m aware of into gender and organic farming in Ireland. However globally, it is possible to say that there are more women who head organic farms, proportionately, than women who head conventional farms.

The figures tend to suggest between 20% (e.g. Norway) and 30 % (e.g. Canada) of organic farms are headed by women. About 10% of conventional farms are headed by women, a figure which holds for the Irish situation too, according to the CSO’s most recent figures from 2007.

However, the lack of women heading the farm is more pronounced again for younger conventional farmers, that is, farmers under 45.

A quick scan through the ‘in conversion to organic’ list on the IOFGA website  (as posted there since 18^th October 2010) suggests that just 14% of these farms are headed by women. However, another 12% are mixed, listing both male and female. So in total about ¼ of organic farms in Ireland aren’t headed by males.

It is also the case that organic farmers tend to be a younger, with 92% of them having at least one member under 45 years old, as compared to 75% of conventional farms.

There are also other indicators: many of the key people in the two main organic certification bodies, the Organic Trust and IOFGA (the Irish Organic Farmers and Growers Association)  are women: examples include development officer, chair, certification manager/national coordinator, magazine editor and board members.

This does differ quite significantly from, for example, the Irish Farmers Association (IFA), or the Irish Farmers Journal. Where women do contribute to the Farmers Journal, it tends to be in the lifestyle or ancillary sections.

Importantly, these sorts of visible personnel in the farming communities send messages to people as to the roles of men and women in farming and food, through their specific positions in their respective organisations, as much as by their words.

Then there is simple economics: some researchers suggest that women are attracted to organic farming and food for more basic economic reasons. Organic smallholdings are just that –  small – and as such offer opportunities for those with less capital resources to enter the world of agri-food businesses.

This also taps into the fact that women have, historically, been the ones in charge of the food, as Tunnicliffe pointed out at the start. That’s shopping for it, cooking with it, and also doing some of the more house-orientated aspects of the family farm. These latter areas include what used to be called, in rural Ireland, the egg money – i.e. selling some eggs locally while the male did the ‘proper farming’. Women also did more of the baking and growing for the family and also sometimes the country market (a farmers’ market type event that has been going for decades, but one less orientated towards full time farmers/growers, and more orientated towards farmers’ wives) .

All of this lends itself well to mixed organic and relatively small farms, where multitasking women can excel.

Organic also offers a new entry point for people who are not carrying on a lineage of farming tradition – in other words, quite well educated urban dwellers who relocate to the country to set up a farm and sometimes also food business.

Talking about the situation in Canada, Dr. Jennifer Sumner, (assistant professor University of Toronto) points out that “the role of women farmers over time has been diminishing as agriculture has become bigger, more industrialized and more concentrated. But, with the rise in organic agriculture, you’ve seen the return of women as more equal partners in agriculture. Over the last 15 to 20 years, as organics gained popularity and there came a critical mass of organic farmers, more and more of them were women.”

Using a complex quantitative analysis of 12 socio-cultural, economic and environmental factors, research from Norway found women farmers “valued nature, animals and rural life, more than their male counterparts” who were more concerned with economic considerations.

However, organic farming itself also emerged as a distinct area as regards farming motivations, irrespective of gender: “there were also significant differences between organic and conventional farmers regarding their interest in the environment with organic farmers more often citing environment as a motivating factor” (in their decision to farm).

This Norwegian research essentially found that, while practicing organic farming was the most important element in categorising attitude to the environment and a more nurturing or feminine approach to farming in general, female organic farmers were at the most distinct end of the spectrum. Male organic and female conventional farmers often shared attitudes, whilst male conventional farmers were at the other end again from the female organic farmers as regards farming attitudes and motivations.

Categorising organic farming as more nurturing and feminine is a complex and fascinating area in itself, but one beyond the scope of this piece. For now, let’s leave the last word to Robin Tunnicliffe:

“Organics is not just a method of production. It’s a whole philosophy of healthy soil, animals, communities, farms, farmers, plants. . . . When you have more women in agriculture it tends to make it less production-oriented, less focused on yield and profit, and it expands the focus to family health and community health — areas that research shows are of particular interest to women.”

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Darren

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