Women's Work: The Untold Story of America's Female Farmers

"Women's Work" was funded in part by Central Life Sciences.

We are passionate about helping America's farmers realize the full potential of their hard work and dedication by partnering with them to grow their life's work every day.

And by U.S.

Sugar, growing American food and fresh produce for America's families for nearly 100 years.

We're proud to honor female farmers for their outstanding contributions to American agriculture and to our country.

(gentle music) - The story of the United States is one of land.

Land tended and revered, explored and stolen, claimed, settled, and tilled.

At the center of the American narrative is the farmer in all of his heroism and grit.

He has kept the nation fed and clothed through prosperity and hardship.

But the story of American agriculture has only been half told.

I'm Audra.

In my journey to track down the farmers who grow the food for my table, I found who's been missing from the story, women.

More than a decade ago, I founded the Female Farmer Project.

Since then, I've documented women farmers as they've planted fields, repaired tractors, rocked babies, and worried over bills.

Women have always farmed, but their contributions and legacies have been buried by history's plow.

Being left out has consequences.

Women farmers have less access to land, credit, and educational opportunities.

Despite this, the women I've met are innovating for the future while honoring the agricultural legacies of their foremothers.

So come with me as I discover the female farmers of America's past, present and future.

- Women have been ignored, their contribution to agriculture, and what I see as the main problem with that is not enough food, hunger.

- We were poor, but we were rich with food.

- The women were the ones at the foreground of everything.

And I think unfortunately, a lot of the time they're left out of our history.

- It wasn't assumed that they had an identity of their own, that their labor mattered, right?

And of course, the world was ordered in such a way that that was permissible.

I mean, we're still talking about a period in the 1970s when women could barely get credit cards on their own.

- So she grew things in Laos to eat.

She grew food in the refugee camp.

When we got to America, she would find open space and grow food for us.

So she was always growing food.

- Threshing the beans and also the wheat.

That's where I learned a lot of these things, spending time with my grandmother.

(gentle music) - She was very strong.

She was out baling hay and coming back into the house and doing the bills and fixing dinner.

Next morning, she'd be on a combine.

- I grew up on a ranch in Montana, and I remember at one point, my aunt pulled me aside and said, "You know, if you wanna stay in ranching, you're gonna have to marry a rancher.

The ranch is gonna go to your brother, so you should get a good education."

- When I looked for my daughter, granddaughter, and daughters, what I hope to pass on to them is that farming is one of the most helpful, useful, and noble professions that you can ever have.

- And that saying that good things come to those who wait, I'm pretty sure it had to do with food.

I'm pretty sure that sitting patiently watching anything grow and nurturing it is one of the things that helps you learn how to create a better home.

(soft music) - [Audra] Long before European colonization, Indigenous communities were expertly hunting, gathering, and cultivating crops.

These traditional food systems honored and often replicated the cycles found in nature with great respect given to the water, animals, and land.

In most cases, women were the primary farmers.

- To me, it's what my ancestors did.

We've been here a very, very long time, and they lived off the land, even before the government came in.

So these are some of the things that they harvested and ate and preserved.

- [Audra] The land that is now Southern Arizona has one of the longest agricultural histories in North America.

Before colonization, Indigenous communities worked the land collectively, sharing in both the labor and the harvest.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forcibly relocated Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands onto reservations.

In 1887, the Dawes Act reorganized the reservation system parceling out small allotments of land to individual families.

Not only did this force a new system of agriculture, but it also changed Indigenous family structure.

The US government recognized men as the heads of households, despite the fact that many tribes were matrilineal.

(Ramona speaking in her native language) - My first memories of growing food started when I was four years old because my dad experimented with soils.

- [Audra] Ramona Button and her family operate Ramona Farms in Southern Arizona's Gila River Indian Community.

- Before all the planting or anything started, he would do a prayer asking the grandfather up in heaven to bring us success with the work that we're doing.

And so he would have the digging stick and make the little holes for the seeds.

And then he told me, put four, one for the insects or animals who are gonna come from the ground, maybe they're hungry, and pray that they leave at least two seeds or one so that we do get a plant.

- We wanna honor our ancestors and keep our culture alive.

And for us, a lot of people sometimes say, "Well you're native and you're Pima or Akimel O'odham and you're Tohono O'odham.

What kind of culture do you guys do?"

Well, for us, our family particularly, we farm and we grow things.

We grow our foods that our ancestors ate, and we wanna keep that alive.

And that's a hard, hard job.

And it takes total dedication and time, it's your life.

- [Audra] In order to grow traditional foods for their community, the Buttons have expanded their operation to farm the allotments of several relatives and tribal elders.

- We're operating now about 4,000 acres total, and it is mainly in cotton right now.

We are starting to raise our tepary beans again to fill orders for next year, and also Pima corn.

- [Audra] Many of these traditional foods, such as the tepary bean, were once at risk of becoming extinct.

- But the tepary beans, he said, "This is precious, very precious, because it's gonna be gone, could be gone in your time."

So I went looking, and there were the beans, the white tepary beans, that's the Stotoah Bavi, and the brown tepary beans, which is the S-Oam Bavi And I said, "Oh my gosh."

I said, "Here it is."

I was so excited and so happy.

I said, "My dad is still with me."

- My mom's always had such a strong say in our family and in what goes into production, in what goes and what she wants to see happen.

It was really her vision and her calling, so to speak, and her mission.

And my dad helped facilitate it.

Together, they just made this awesome team, - [Audra] 100 miles south of Ramona Farms near Tucson, members of the Tohono O'odham Nation are farming cooperatively.

At San Javier Co-Op Farm, tribal members grow traditional foods and teach wild harvesting to the next generation.

- Keep in mind that we need to grow farmers.

So we created internships, two year internships, and I saw that it really worked.

And I say that because a lot of those young people, it changed their lives by giving them a sense of purpose, a role that has maybe, that had at the time been, I don't wanna say forgotten, it just changed with our history, kids are going to school, they're going straight into a different kind of workforce.

That agricultural or that, that means of living, or that way of living just had changed.

So we wanted to bring it back.

- I think they enjoy the work, they enjoy the outdoors, probably because their grandparents did it.

The whole community helped out when it was planting time, harvesting time.

And that's what we try to instill with the community now to come out and help.

- It keeps us O'odham I would say.

It keeps us remembering not only the ways of harvesting and paying attention and having intimate relationship with the land, but also our stories and our songs.

We see a really bright future ahead for us, and it's all based on our food.

- It's so precious because land is something that you can live on, you can thrive on, no matter what you put on it.

Having your feet in the ground and walking through the plants, it energizes you.

You forget the negative energy that is around in the world, and it's a healing thing.

(waves splashing) (soft music) - [Audra] In the 1600s, European settlers began to arrive on the shores of North America in greater numbers.

Most of them were not farmers.

They were poor indentured servants, artisans, and merchants.

Their lack of farming knowledge resulted in the starvation of entire colonies.

Desperate settlers ate shoe leather and horses until they were taught techniques by Indigenous women who farmed using hoes and other hand tools.

A labor shortage in settler colonies led to the rise of the plow, which in turn led to the large- scale cultivation of grain.

The European settlers brought with them their patriarchal order and their common laws, which tied the identity of a woman to her father or her husband.

Settler women primarily tended to household tasks and childcare while men worked in the fields.

This was a departure from the Indigenous communities, which saw women in charge of food production.

For the first time in America, men began to dominate agriculture.

- If women wanted their families to survive, they had to labor.

They had to think and make decisions and participate in farms.

I mean, the irony of women's labor being erased from agriculture is that we also know it's absolutely essential.

- [Audra] Women had very few rights in early America.

Single women were allowed to own land in certain circumstances, but married women were not.

Widows were only allowed to keep one third of the estate accumulated during marriage, and even that was required to be passed down to male heirs.

In 1848, New York State passed the Married Women's Property Act, allowing women to own land.

It was not until half a century later that all states adopted it.

- There's a legacy of patriarchy on family farms, which continues today, and primarily that is through land inheritance.

So men are the ones who own the land.

When they decide they're not gonna farm anymore, they often pass it on to the oldest son.

Now that farming is not, in some cases, that profitable, it can be passed on to other sons as well.

But there's a very high disincentive to break up the land and give equal amounts to every child.

So even now, women, it's rare that women will inherit the farm when it's passed on to the next generation.

So that patriarchal legacy still continues today.

(bell ringing) - [Audra] Some families however, left a different legacy.

- Gaston, you wanna get up?

Your mom's calling you.

- [Audra] In Paradise, Pennsylvania, 10th generation farmer Elisa Ranck-Fleming raises grass-fed beef on family land.

- So we are a crop and beef farm.

We grow corn, grass, hay we have several acres of pasture and soybeans, and then we rent a few acres out to Amish neighbors who grow tobacco or corn.

So we have 111 acres, and we have the bed and breakfast and farm tours, and we sell beef.

- [Audra] Elisa's Mennonite ancestors fled religious persecution, ultimately settling in colonial Pennsylvania.

- Colonists that came to Pennsylvania, they wanted religious freedom, and they came to farm.

So I think they purchased farmland from William Penn's son in Lancaster County.

We have a document, I think, in our family that says that we were part of the British before it was the United States of America, it was still part of the Crown.

So it's just been a long history of agriculture.

There's a story behind like every door.

And so just wanting to maintain that.

In April of 2018, we had a barn fire and lost our beloved family barn.

And so in July of 2018, we built this barn.

It's also mortise and tenon, trying to respect the history of the barn that was here before it.

And we're using the same foundation and using the beams that run east and west - [Audra] Today, Verdant View Farm has now been led by women for four generations.

- And I hang this picture above my desk because I love seeing the women in the picture.

So my great-grandmother had a strong interest in capturing all these great photos of the farm and farmed with my great-grandfather.

They had a dairy farm.

My grandparents, when they moved here, they continued the dairy farm.

My grandmother just saw, she heard that there was a need, as tourism was expanding, there was a need for places to stay.

And so she opened up her home and welcomed visitors from around the world to come stay at the bed and breakfast.

She also raised turkeys and just constantly innovating and redefining who she was.

When my parents moved here, they decided to continue the bed and breakfast, and they really expanded upon the educational aspect of the farm.

And in the years that they were operating the bed and breakfast, they also were raising a family and started really seeing that there was a need to teach people about agriculture.

When I came back, I started to work with my mother, especially in managing the farm, and then she got sick.

She was diagnosed with brain cancer.

And so overnight, I had to just take over.

And the physical demands and the mental demands were so high, I just didn't, I had always been integrated into the day-to-day work of the farm, but I had never had to manage it alone.

And it was hard because I couldn't really turn to many girlfriends.

I don't know many other female farmers that are managing a farm.

And so going to meetings, I'd be one of two women at the meeting, but in the end, I just went to neighbors, I went to family members, I went to meetings, and I just would openly say, "I'm not sure if I can do this."

And really, several people that I really admire and respect, they said, "Yeah, I think you can."

And it took that vote of confidence to garner the courage to say, "Okay, here we go."

Expanding the educational aspect and seeing what opportunities there are and how we can innovate and how we can continue to build upon the legacy that was built by all the women before me.

These are my mom's boots.

I get to wear them every day, which is pretty awesome because I saw her putting her boots on every day to go out to the milking parlor.

So I feel pretty, it's pretty great to walk in her shoes.

There are so many days where it's very difficult and I say, "This is well beyond my bandwidth or my abilities."

And you just have to get up, put your boots back on, just get back out there.

And every project can be broken down into manageable steps.

And so what's the step today?

What am I doing today?

(light country music) - [Audra] As the colonies became more established, a labor shortage prevented the scaling up of agricultural systems.

Colonists turned to the slave trade to import millions of enslaved Africans.

Forced across the Middle Passage and sold to plantation owners in the southern states, the enslaved endured unspeakable horrors.

Crops like tobacco, indigo, and rice were essential to the development of the early United States economy.

And only possible due to the labor of enslaved Africans.

West African women braided rice seed into their hair, preparing for a future they were not sure they would see.

They also brought knowledge of rice cultivation and the basket technology necessary for its winnowing, which made rice a vital cash crop for plantations.

The experiences of enslaved women were distinctly different from enslaved men.

This context is essential for understanding the larger role that women have played in American agriculture.

- Well if you don't understand it, you don't talk about it, then you're only learning half the history because slavery didn't mean the same thing or didn't operate in the same way, in some similar ways, but in some very different ways for enslaved women.

In many instances, women are the caregivers, but they're also the ones who are performing the labor on plantations.

They're also the ones who are producing food.

They're the ones, in my estimation, I'm just thinking about my own ancestors who had to do everything.

Gender roles didn't really work all that well for a lot of these folks.

I think there were some things that they were expected to do because they were women.

But the truth of the matter is, the reality is they had to do some of everything to sustain families and communities.

So if you're not talking about part of the story, you're not doing the whole story justice.

And I remember the women in my family who took care of the families and the communities with the farming and the other sort of work that they perform in rural spaces.

- Sand on earth, widespread soil Lives in every flower every tree Gots more things but you see it on me Give me life to see the world, the world To see the world - [Audra] Althea Raiford-Billingsley and her brother Matthew are descendants of coastal Georgia's freshwater Gullah Geechee.

(bright music) As sixth generation farmers and military veterans, they farm on land purchased by their ancestor, Jupiter, a freed slave who served in the army during the Civil War.

- He bought this back in 1874 for two cents an acre, and it was 474 acres.

Gullah Geechee Corridor comes all the way down here to good old South Georgia, Sapelo Island, Darien, Glynn County.

We are, we are a unique group of Africans that were enslaved on the coast.

And if you look at the history, all the ships that landed on the coast here, North Carolina, South Carolina, and here on Jekyll Island is one of the last places where one of the last slave ships docked.

Back in the day, Gullah Geechee people used to have a conversation, and in order to keep the slave masters from knowing what was going on, they pronounced the words differently.

You also have to realize that they had stolen Africans from various different tribes and pushed them all into one place.

So that means the conversation that was being had, they had to find a way to understand what it means, how to call somebody a white man and not call him a white man.

And how to say that the slave master was doing this and a slave master not know that this is what was going on.

And then we also had to learn how to communicate with each other.

I like to say that Gullah Geechee is a diverse African culture that maintained its grassroots, although it wasn't planted here, but transplanted.

(soft music) This is the one place that I know no matter what, I'm safe.

No matter what, I can find my peace here.

I can find my center.

- [Audra] Althea grew up on the family land, working in the garden beside her grandparents.

Her mother and her siblings chose not to farm.

After her military career, Althea was drawn back home with the intention of reviving the farm and continuing the family legacy for the next generation.

(bright music) - This has been like a very eye-opening experience to all the things that the women that came before me did to maintain, to keep, and then for me to have the opportunity to do the same for my nieces and my nephews.

But we're creating something that's more viable for their future in the way the world works now.

- [Audra] When Althea was growing up in Brunswick, Georgia there were no local grocery stores that would sell food to Black residents.

So the family raised and preserved crops, kept livestock, and bartered with their neighbors.

- So there's a long list of things that come with being a farmer here and a farmer of color.

And then add the fact that the people that were running the farm were women.

Instead telling their husbands, "Hey, this is what we're gonna grow."

Because the land was passed down through the female line in my family.

For us, it was my granddaughter, my daughter, my daughter's daughter is gonna follow in my footsteps.

And I'm fortunate that my feet are a little bit bigger than theirs so it wasn't that hard to follow in their footsteps, but it has been hard learning what that looks like for me.

- [Audra] In many ways, the story of Gilliard Farm is one of generations of women laying the foundation for their descendants, despite the fact that they would not be there to see it.

It's a tradition that echoes the courage and foresight of the women forced across the Middle Passage carrying seeds for the future.

- They were thinking about their children, their children's children.

They were thinking about the community's children, right?

Because for a lot of these women, it wasn't just about mothering their own children it was about community mothering and other mothering.

So in that way, I think they were very connected to their enslaved African ancestors in helping to lay the foundation for a future that they weren't going to see.

(soft music) - [Audra] In 1862, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which opened up the settlement of the American West.

Easterners, freed slaves, and immigrants packed up and moved, hoping for a fresh start and 160 acres of land.

Among them was the Knutzen family, who in 1894 settled in the Skagit Valley of Washington.

- I just still can't even imagine what that generation of women went through because they were feeding not just their families, but all the workers that worked for them.

And I know she was a very strong support to my grandfather as well.

Emotionally, it's sometimes overlooked.

- [Audra] Today, Kristi Gundersen and her family are the fifth and sixth generations to farm this land.

- I would say potatoes is very much like raising children.

It's not always perfect, but you fix what's not the best you can, and then you get to see the fruits of your labor when you're done.

And it's very fun in that I get to be part of all aspects of it.

The generational aspect of this farm has been richly protected.

And I truly appreciate that.

- [Audra] Even though Kristi grew up on the farm and knows the business inside and out, people often assume that her husband is the farmer.

- This happens, this happens a fair amount.

You walk in and you introduce, and it's just the men, which it's fine, but they say, "What do you grow?"

And they're looking at my husband and they're talking to him and he will stop right away.

He goes, "No, it's my wife's family."

It was interesting because they still thought that it was a second job for him.

"No, it's my wife's farm."

So just to have that conversation with people and then educate them about it, it's very fun.

(lively music) - [Audra] The beginning of the 1900s marked huge growth for America's cities, as well as advances in food preservation and transportation.

Food became more accessible, and grocery stores began to replace the family farm.

Fearing negative consequences for the country's food supply, the first Roosevelt administration implemented a country life commission and campaign to improve agrarian living conditions.

Many of the commission's offerings targeted farm women with promises of powered laundry machines and better schoolhouses.

(gentle music) World War I brought a new wave of hardship.

With the mass deployment of men to serve on battlefields overseas, as well as the devastating Spanish flu pandemic, across the country, men were gone and women stepped up, launching the Women's Land Army, which coordinated and labored to produce America's wartime food supply.

(upbeat music) Farmers enjoyed high crop prices through the 1910s and '20s.

This, combined with the belief that Americans had a duty to expand westward, led to more farmland being plowed than ever before.

Thousands of farmers began to plant despite being unfamiliar with the weather patterns and ecosystems of their new homes.

The Great Depression of the 1930s brought low crop prices and bankrupt farmers.

Desperate, farmers planted more, which led to overplowing, and the deadly Dust Bowl.

The combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl placed new physical and economic demands upon farm women.

Many responded by creating supplemental streams of income through the sale of butter and eggs.

A laborious undertaking considering there is limited electricity in rural America at this time.

- Yeah, butter money and egg money were always thought of as something that women sort of contributed that didn't really have that much importance for the farm.

But in reality, the butter money and the egg money was always there every single year.

And so if there were crop failures and not that much money from a single year, that was the steady income for farms.

And on many farms, the butter money and the egg money was the thing that saw them through.

(explosion) - [Audra] By World War II, the nation's food supply was again at risk as most Americans no longer farmed and those who did were drafted into military service.

A shortage in farm labor led to the reemergence of the Women's Land Army, comprised mostly of college women who had never worked on a farm.

Between 1943 and 1945, one and a half million women worked on American farms, increasing food production by 32% above pre-war levels.

(gentle music) After World War II, a second wave of homesteaders taking advantage of the Homestead Act headed north.

In 1947, Marge Mullen and her husband Frank moved to the territory of Alaska, where more than 230 native Alaskan tribes made up half of the population.

- When I was in my early 20s, someone pointed out to me about a three inch article in the Chicago Tribune telling of a great deal that was offered to the returning veterans in that they could move to the Kenai Peninsula, wherever that was, build a habitable dwelling, that was really attractive to us since neither his family or my family had ever owned an acre of ground.

And so after my husband returned from 93 missions as a pilot of a medium bomber, we're headed for the Kenai Peninsula.

And he thought the only way to travel was in a plane.

So we flew over the road through Canada, reaching the border to Alaska.

- [Audra] After arriving in Anchorage, the Mullens took a train as far as they could and then hiked 65 miles across the Kenai Peninsula to claim their homestead on Soldotna Creek.

- Because I had never backpacked any place before, and I had just a wooden frame with a big pocket between, and a pair of shoes that my husband made me buy.

And we didn't have a tent, we just had a mosquito net.

And it rained like hell.

In the morning, we had to get up and wring out our sleeping bags.

First bridge we came to was over the Moose River.

My new boots were so painful that I thought I couldn't walk another mile.

- Veterans could get about a six month kind of priority period on their land, and all they had to do was pay a $10 filing fee and build what was, according to the Bureau of Land Management at the time, a habitable dwelling.

- We could overlook the land and take a really choice piece of property that included river frontage and the creek that ran through it, which we considered our water supply for a while.

We built a 14 by 16 cabin.

- Homesteading is definitely not for everybody.

It sure is not for me.

And I think that if you wanted to come up to Alaska, you had to be prepared for the worst.

And you had to be absolutely determined to not only live in a completely new place, because a lot of these homesteaders were not necessarily from the state of Alaska either.

A lot of them who came up to homestead were actually from other areas.

- I never felt like I wanted to go back to Chicago until 1952 when my husband got polio.

And then all the jobs, physical jobs really, came back to my strong frame.

- [Audra] After Frank became partially paralyzed with polio, Marge was left to build and manage their homestead along with their four young children.

She hauled water from the river, cleared land, and put up vegetables and meat for the winter.

Marge spent months digging the family's well with only a trowel and a coffee can.

Despite all of this, Marge never had her name on the deed.

Only men qualified as head of the household.

And women were hidden in the records, listed only as wives.

- Historically, many women on farms identified themselves as farm wives, which suggested that they really were not the farmers themselves, but they were helping out their husbands, they were taking care of the children, they were doing more domestic chores.

But actually from the beginning, that was never the case.

Even women who identified as farm wives were oftentimes very much involved in the farm operation.

- [Marge] His name is Francis Edward Mullen.

- [Audra] So how did that make you feel that you couldn't get the land in your name?

(Marge laughing) - Oh, it was... It was more than a joke because it ended up that I did all the physical labor.

(somber music) - When we think about Black women, certainly Indigenous women not allowed to own property, that also applied to white women.

It was very, very difficult for women to inherit land.

Up until 1982, there was laws in place that essentially meant that if there was a married couple and the husband died, the woman paid taxes on the farm as if she had inherited the entire farm.

So she paid huge inheritance taxes and men didn't.

And so it meant that most women whose husbands died lost their ranches because they could not afford the taxes on those.

That changed after a lot of effort from women farmers in the 1980s.

- Hydroponics gives us a lot more control.

- [Audra] Marge's neighbors, the Lancashires, arrived in Soldotna in 1948.

They too were a veteran family from the Midwest.

Today, over 70 years later, their daughter, Abby Ala, owns Ridgeway Farms near the original homestead.

- I did everything with my dad.

Literally.

When I was about 11, my dad needed clean seed.

And so I got to raise the seed and sell it to him as a business.

And he had already taught me how to drive in a straight line.

As the year progressed, since they were certified seed potatoes, the people from the USDA had to come down and inspect them.

Well, the potatoes didn't know I was a little girl, and they were good seed.

And so they were growing really wonderful.

And there was no black leg, hollow heart, anything.

And so they came and inspected the potatoes and they go, "Oh, she's doing pretty good for an 11-year-old girl."

- [Audra] Abby always wanted to be a farmer.

And she sought out Marge, who took her under her wing.

Now a successful farmer and a grandmother herself, Abby is passing on that same support to the next generation of Alaskan women farmers.

- I don't remember there ever being a "You can't do that because you're a girl" attitude around any of the women I hung out with or was raised by.

- [Audra] Amy Seitz is Abby's niece and farms the original Lancashire family homestead, along with her mother, Martha, and partner, Jane.

As the Executive Director of the Alaska Farm Bureau, Amy represents the growing trend of women in leadership roles.

Today, Alaska has the highest percentage of women farmers in the nation.

- It's important that women be in leadership positions because if they're not, then half the population and sometimes the brightest people and most innovative people are excluded from leading the organization.

So if agriculture is gonna be a wonderful place to work and a successful operation, women need to be included.

(bright music) (upbeat music) - [Audra] By 1960, only 8% of the population worked on farms.

Advances in technology and machinery led to increased yields.

As farms grew bigger and more efficient, a counterculture was emerging, fueled by the energy of the civil rights, feminist, and organized labor movements.

Rural areas saw the formation of small self-governed farm communities such as the Back to the Landers, the Landdykes, and the Freedom Farm Collective.

- I think it's because we tend to have a very heterosexual bias.

So it's hard to imagine women as owning and running farms if they have a male partner.

It's hard to imagine women running farms without a man.

It's hard to imagine women running farms together.

- [Audra] America's social dynamics were evolving, with women fighting for equal treatment and taking on non-traditional roles.

But policy and data collection were much slower to catch up.

Prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, a woman was unable to get her own bank account or a loan without a male co-signer.

And before 1978, the US Department of Agriculture did not count women farmers at all.

- So for a while, it looked like there were no women involved in agriculture basically because of the way the census counted women in agriculture, counted who was a farmer.

But then they started changing the way the data was collected, and there could be multiple operators on farms.

So then there wasn't just one operator on farms, there could be two, and later there could be three and four.

And so then, once that changed, then the percentage of women farmers increased dramatically, at least in the data.

So that made people sit up and take notice that farming wasn't just a male occupation, but women were farming, women were farming too.

- [Audra] Just as farm women were finally being counted, the 1980s farm crisis began.

Crop prices plummeted, and a wave of foreclosures forced families off their farms.

Farmer suicide rates skyrocketed, and farm women became advocates.

They rallied in Washington DC, created farmer helplines, and organized penny auctions to buy back farms in foreclosure.

- I have such distinct memories of the farm crisis, but I think one of the things that made me a sociologist actually is I grew up in a culture that was highly individualistic, and that when we lost our ranch, took it, so it was such a personal loss.

It felt like a really personal failure.

And no one talked about the farm crisis.

It wasn't until I was in college, I think, that I learned about the farm crisis.

And it wasn't until I went through the Great Recession as a young adult that I understood the ways that economic forces could have these profound impacts on an individual.

After we left the ranch, one of the jobs my dad got was cleaning up foreclosed ranches.

So he would go into ranches.

People were really angry when they left, and they would sometimes take the drywall with them and all the light fixtures and just take the their anger out on the place itself.

And so he would clean them up.

And then my mom and my brother and sister and I would, when they would go and auction off the ranches, we would sell concessions.

And so I got to, it's part of this education that I didn't even know I was getting at the time, sitting in all these foreclosed ranches selling hot dogs as people came and bid on parts of people's lives.

(upbeat music) - [Audra] As the financial crisis was hitting rural America, global poverty, unrest, and war brought a new wave of immigrants and refugees seeking safety and better lives.

(soft music) (Sua speaking her native language) - [Audra] In 1975, Sua Tao Yang and her family left their home country of Laos.

The Communist Party had come to power and was systematically carrying out human rights abuses against the Hmong population.

Like many of their neighbors, Sua's family fled across the border to Thailand by boat.

For five years, they endured the crowded conditions of Thailand's Bun Dong refugee camp.

- So in Laos, I just remember walking to the farm far away from the village with my mom.

And just, when we get to the farm, I would just love to just pick the cucumbers because they're really, the Hmong cucumbers get really big, right?

So because we didn't have any toys, we would just use that as our toy.

So it'd be like my dog.

So I would just be holding a cucumber and playing with the cucumber.

And when we fled to Thailand, each family, we were given a little plot of land so we can grow our own vegetables and help that to supplement whatever food distribution that we would get.

(bright music) - [Audra] In 1980, the family of 10 was finally sponsored by a church in Washington state and was able to emigrate.

- My parents are simple people, and especially my mother.

So she's very humble.

She doesn't think that what she does is very important.

Just growing vegetables and growing flowers and putting things in the ground and sharing it with the world.

It doesn't feel like a big thing.

And yet I feel like in the big picture, she has done a marvelous thing for the community.

- [Audra] In 1987, Sua joined the Indo-Chinese Farm Project, which trained refugee farmers in practices specific to the region.

The participants also received business training, which opened doors to area farmer's markets.

Today, Sua and her daughters run Yang Family Farms together.

For nearly 30 years, they have sold cut flowers and vegetables at Seattle's famous Pike Place Market.

- It was just another season, but doing it in a different way where now she could sell some of what she was growing.

And she never intended for any of us to get involved in the farming.

It was just her thing and it was just her passion, her love, her way of contributing to the family.

I think my mother must have magic fingers.

I mean, whatever she tries to grow, it grows.

Whatever she does, she does so quickly, it's like magic.

It just seems so effortless, so easy.

- [Audra] My journey to learn the other half of the story has taken me to women-led farms across the United States.

And it has also taken me through time.

Because if you want to understand the farmer of today, you need to understand her past.

For generations, she has been overlooked and underserved, but she has been here all along fighting for her right to be counted.

To make a home for women inside the history of agriculture not only sets the record straight, it lights the path forward.

- Well, women's work is something that people oftentimes think of as care work, domestic work, work that isn't actually compensated for.

But one of the things that we found studying women's work in agriculture is I was always pointing out that women were doing agricultural work, you know, such as driving tractors, doing the financial part of the of the farm, which was often thought of as not real farm work.

But then I realized, too, that in the meantime, not taking seriously women's care work that they're caring for the farmer, the farm family and that that work is all uncompensated.

And so women do both the agricultural labor but also the care labor as well.

And and I often say that women don't just have a double shift on the farm, but they sometimes have a triple or quadruple shift because many times they're doing off farm work as well.

- Of course, women have always been farming.

It's an honor to be able to continue the tradition.

I've learned so much, especially from my own mother, how much she was able to balance and manage on a day-to-day basis.

Just incredibly grateful to be able to follow in her footsteps, literally, I do use her boots.

I literally slip on her boots.

- I really wish that everyone knew how to grow things.

And I really think that even if you're doing a container garden or if you're planting a plant in your house, or if you're doing a tower garden, I mean that's something Being in touch with nature, watching something grow, feeling it, seeing it, smelling it, tasting it, eating from it, having that nutrient denseness right next to you but like in such a, from field to table, literally.

So, I mean, I think we do it because we've always done it and we know it's important and it's a part of our history.

- The value that we bring to a farm is very important.

And that it doesn't just have to be the strong, you know, plow the field.

I mean, it's like it's just as important that we're supportive in every other avenue.

- We need more of you.

Come on, come over to the dirty side.

Come on, come on, come on.

Come one, come all.

Please believe.

It's called Mother Nature for a reason.

I'm very prideful in the fact that I'm a woman farmer.

I feel that those young ladies, whomever they may be, whatever field they decide to specialize in, or whatever dream they see themselves, we need each of you doing that.

We need you to follow your passion in agriculture, wherever that is.

- I would encourage any young woman to partake in agriculture.

It puts better food on our table.

It leads to our whole family have better health.

It's a time you can find yourself in the field and bring your own thoughts forward.

- I think that the women being farmers, we are able to help each other and we support each other.

We give each other ideas.

I feel like for the most part, we women wish to see each other succeed in farming, especially our younger generation.

I feel like now it's our turn to help each other so that we can succeed as well and be as successful as our parents have been.

So I feel like it's a special place.

- It's always helping.

It's always hand in hand.

It's always, I always say, from my land to your land and your land to my land, what we can do is to help out from you.

You can help out reverse and help us out as well.

- And I believe that that strength will be passed on to the next generation of women on the farm.

But it's women's work who continues to make farms strong and will continue to feed America.

- In terms of women in agriculture, women reclaiming their family history and bringing it back to life.

And I think that's a really powerful example, again, of what women's roles are.

To take something that has been sitting or has been dormant for so long and still see the value, still see the importance, and still see the function of it, that is still there.

- Remember that you are a farmer, not the farmer's wife, sister, whatever, you are the farmer, and you have the right to be here, and you have the right to all the resources any other farmer has had access to today, throughout the course of history.

And we need you.

We need you.

Because if you're looking at farming through a female lens, it looks different.

It manifests differently.

And we need you to do that and show the women around you, and the men for that matter, that you can do it.

Because historically, you always have.

(inspiring music)