Farming & Feminism

Alright, I'm going to get a little bit personal for a minute and talk about my experiences working on the campus farm here at UMD. I didn't expect this when I started working, but I've actually found being a farm hand to be a very empowering experience. The farm manager (Lindsay) will, for instance, just hand me a drill and a box full of bits and tell me to go assemble a wheelbarrow, or give me a hacksaw and some screws and ask me to mend the fence. She's an awesome manager because she assumes that I (and her other employees) can handle whatever she throws at us.

All four of the current farm hands happen to be women. Reactions to our all-female farm crew range from perplexed to amused to patronizing. When people (and by "people," I mean people we encounter in the farming world, like hay salespeople and livestock producers) automatically assume that all of us are weak, clueless, and generally incompetent, it's incredibly frustrating. The idea that we're constantly being judged for being "weaker" is completely absurd: even if women do tend to be smaller than men, does anyone actually think that a couple extra pounds of muscle mass are going to make the difference when you're dealing with a 2,000 pound Holstein? Of course not. It's become very clear to me based on my experiences this year that the farming world is still definitely male-dominated and full of not-so-subtle sexism. I've also noticed that my College of Agriculture classes are generally chock full of...women. So what's up with that?

It turns out that a lot of women in the College of Ag, including me, are aspiring veterinarians. Many are planning to become small animal vets, which is awesome, and some want to continue to work in agriculture by becoming livestock vets, which is awesome too. Although women make up a significant majority of students in vet school these days, livestock vets are still predominantly male. There is also a shortage of livestock vets in general right now; the Iowa Veterinary Medical Association writes that the fact that women compose the majority of vet students "is seen by some as a bad sign for the livestock business. Female vets have traditionally preferred small-animal practices." Hmm...this "preference" for small animals couldn't have anything to do with not wanting to deal with constant insinuations that we can't handle livestock, could it? It's a tough situation, because attitudes towards women in agriculture won't change until we "prove" ourselves, but it's the existence of the assumptions that we have to subvert that make a career in agriculture so unappealing to so many women.

Anyway, that's why I spent the first half of this post describing why I think Lindsay is such a great manager: she doesn't create an atmosphere where her employees, as women, need to prove anything, and that is incredibly refreshing. I think it's fantastic that so many of my fellow livestock vet wannabes here are women, and I'm glad we have people like Lindsay and our UMD vet, Dr. Angela Black, to help us out along the way.

Above: a cow that isn't going to move unless it wants to,
regardless of the gender of the person trying to make it