Uprooting Conventions
Female farmers dig into agriculture
STORY BY SHELBY ROWE | PHOTOS BY DANNY MILLER
It’s the last tree standing on the eighth-of-an-acre plot.
Hundreds of thin branches twist outward and a young wiry kiwi vine with small green leaves leans up against the cracked bark of a tree trunk.
In a year or two it will become part of the tree, just barely, by growing around it for stability while the other plants grow around a trellis, which helps support the thin vines.
Excess metal wire from the kiwi trellis encircles one of the tree’s severed limbs and behind it are piles of wood — remnants of the other trees torn down by Anne Baxter, owner of Arguta Farm, to plant 36 kiwi stems.
Two years ago, the plants started out as sticks about a foot long. While the vines appear to be frail, each one will produce approximately 100 pounds of hardy kiwis that are roughly the size of a date.
People may be accustomed to the fuzzy kiwis imported from New Zealand, but Baxter doesn’t have as much competition growing her variety, the Arguta kiwi, which is much smaller.
“I got into growing kiwis because I taught high school in Samoa while I was in the Peace Corps and I really tried to emphasize healthy foods,” she says. “I started looking at fruits that were available to them and which were the most nutritious. Kiwis came to the top and apples were at the bottom. Nutritionally, they provide a fraction of what kiwis give you.”
Teaching science in Samoa opened Baxter up to a new perspective on life, one where people don’t work three jobs to sustain themselves; they live off the land.
She joined the Peace Corps in 2000 because she wanted to make a difference and says she got back a lot more than she gave.
“I realized that people work too much and don’t take the time to be in the community,” Baxter says. “I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t gone to a place where people grow their own food.”
She works full-time studying microbiology in fish with the Marine Microbes and Toxins Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. Baxter commutes nearly 70 miles on the weekends to Viva Farms, where she leases a small plot of land.
Viva is a nonprofit incubator farm in Burlington that is promoting a new generation of farmers and helping them to establish their own business by providing land, equipment and education.
Baxter is among the nearly 1 million female farmers in Washington — a number that has increased more than 40 percent since 2002, according to a 2012 U.S. Department of Agriculture Census.
Roslyn McNicholl, principle operator of Rabbit Fields Farm, says women can get a lot of respect in the agriculture world.
McNicholl didn’t originally plan on going into agriculture. She was studying business and entrepreneurship at Western and started working in Everson at Broadleaf Farm as a way to spend her summers outside.
It was at Broadleaf that McNicholl began a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Her small project quickly grew, and she decided to buy her own plot of land in Mount Vernon.
Her organic produce is now in more than a dozen local restaurants and several grocery stores.
Margaret Viebrock, director of the Washington State University Chelan-Douglas County Extension, says one reason for the sudden increase in female farmers is a change in how women’s work is viewed by the USDA.
The census formerly counted who owns the farm, which is often a male, even though the female spouse is often a principle operator alongside her husband.
Female farmers have always existed in this male-dominated industry. Now, the numbers reflect how much influence women have in agriculture — they make up nearly one-third of the farmers in Washington, Viebrock says.
However, the demographic of female-owned farms is different than most male-operated farms.
Ninety-eight percent of female farmers have small-scale, specialty crops that rake in less than $250,000 annually, and the women generally aren’t coming from a traditional farming background, Viebrock says.
Many of the women have college degrees. Often, they are new to traditional farming and it is a second career, she says.
Baxter received her undergraduate degree in zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle after transferring from Sonoma State University in California, where she played basketball.
The self-proclaimed Northwest girl came back to her roots and later got her master’s degree at University of Washington for fishery sciences and microbial ecology.
She hopes to establish herself at Viva and eventually buy her own plot of land to farm kiwis and build a plant nursery.
“Now, with the economy and the way things are, that could be a ways out,” she says. “Money is something I want out of [farming], but as a government employee, you don’t make much money. So I have to supplement my income with farming.”
This is the first year Baxter will reap the rewards of her hard work, as it takes years for the kiwi trees to mature and grow fruit.
Baxter also plants garlic, which has sprouted from the ground like fistfuls of long grass in rows next to her kiwi trellises. She’ll likely sell them at a local farmer’s market when the plants peak at the end of summer 2015.
When all of her kiwi trees bear fruit, her sales could reach $30,000 for 2015, and the garlic will bring in around $1,500.
She says she hopes to eventually reach a point when she can quit her day job and farm fulltime.
Gretchen Hoyt was a full-time farmer for more than 40 years and is currently the co-principal operator of Alm Hill Gardens in Everson. Her husband bought the 64 acres of land at a young age for $12,000.
Hoyt, on the other hand, didn’t have any farming experience.
“At the time, I didn’t know any other women who were farming,” she says. “I was driving the tractor and doing that kind of thing. Even today, with the older growers, they think [women] can’t be farmers.”
Hoyt raised her two of her four children on the farm and remembers fastening them into a backpack before climbing into the tractor. Her children helped tend the farm before her family hired seasonal workers.
Being a self-employed female farmer had its advantages because she could choose her hours and spend more time with her family.
Hoyt managed the farm and several employees before her family started leasing most of the land to Growing Washington, a nonprofit group that farms the land and sells CSA boxes. Her management style was to hear the voices of as many employees as possible to improve the farm instead of running it as a hierarchy, she says.
Hoyt remembers a time when she was one of the only women attending agriculture conferences.
Viebrock says she noticed women as an underserved community several years ago. She then began facilitating a Women in Agriculture Conference that is aimed specifically at women helping other women with the risk management factors of farming.
The conference is now held in 16 locations throughout the state, including Skagit County, Spokane County and Thurston County, and educates women about business and financial management, marketing, legal liabilities, economic risk and wellbeing.
Viebrock says she’s getting more and more fathers who want to learn how to integrate their daughters into farm work, although it has formerly been traditional for sons to take over the business.
“Women learn differently,” Viebrock says. “Men don’t share their crop size, yields and how much money they made last year. Women talk about their problems and mentor each other.”
Receiving loans for start-up farms is especially difficult for women because of their limited farming background, and many bankers are looking for experience. Finances are part of the reason so many women have small-scale farms. Farming niche crops gives them an edge in the industry.
“I know a woman who farms the microgreens you see in salads,” Viebrock says. “She sells her produce to the expensive restaurants in town.”
Sustainable and organic small-scale farms are largely popular in Washington, Viebrock says.
It’s kind of a revolution in the food system and some people want to move away from processed, packaged foods, Hoyt says. Selling her organic produce directly to consumers at farmers markets makes it easier to have a small farm and still make money.
Baxter wants to contribute by producing food that is ecologically friendly, she says.
She occasionally bends down to tug tufts of crabgrass out of the soil, shaking off the excess dirt from the roots.
Her fingers are thinly coated in dust from digging into the ground with her bare hands, and tiny light fragments ricochet off her sparkly nail polish when exposed to the afternoon sun.
She’s relaxed, legs crossed, sitting on a bale of brittle, heat-baked hay that overlooks her petite farm and the less-attractive highway about a half-mile away.
Unfazed by the occasional bee that flits by, she plays with two opal rings strung around her neck. They no longer fit her fingers, but her dad gave them to her years ago and, after he passed away in April, she wanted to keep them close to her.
“I’m trying to make it work,” she says. “It’s hard work, but it’s worth it and I want to work and live the way I want to live, doing science and making my own food.”