Agric Hum Values (2010) 27:4355

DOI 10.1007/s10460-008-9190-5

Our market is our community: women farmers and civic

agriculture in Pennsylvania, USA
Amy Trauger Carolyn Sachs Mary Barbercheck
Kathy Brasier Nancy Ellen Kiernan

Accepted: 9 September 2008 / Published online: 19 January 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Civic agriculture is characterized in the literature as complementary and embedded social and economic
strategies that provide economic benefits to farmers at the
same time that they ostensibly provide socio-environmental benefits to the community. This paper presents some
ways in which women farmers practice civic agriculture.
The data come from in-depth interviews with women
practicing agriculture in Pennsylvania. Some of the strategies women farmers use to make a living from the farm
have little to do with food or agricultural products, but all
are a product of the process of providing a living for
farmers while meeting a social need in the community.
Most of the women in our study also connect their business
practices to their gender identity in rural and agricultural
communities, and redefine successful farming in opposition
to traditional views of economic rationality.
Keywords Civic agriculture
Cultural economy

Gender
Public goods
Sustainable agriculture

Women farmers

A. Trauger (&)
Department of Geography, University of Georgia, 210 Field
Street, Athens, GA, USA
e-mail: atrauger@uga.edu
C. Sachs
K. Brasier
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology,
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
M. Barbercheck
Department of Entomology, The Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA, USA
N. E. Kiernan
Cooperative Extension Administration, The Pennsylvania State
University, University Park, PA, USA

Abbreviations
CSA
Community supported agriculture
ERS
USDA Economic Research Service
PA-WAgN Pennsylvania Womens Agricultural
Network
PASA
Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable
Agriculture
USDA
United States Department of Agriculture

Introduction
In the United States (US), more women than ever are
choosing farming as a livelihood. Women comprised 11%
of principal farm operators in 2002, up from only 5% in
1978, the year the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) began distinguishing between operators on the
basis of sex (United States Department of Agriculture
2002). In some parts of the US, the number of women
principal operators are growing at the same time as the
number of male-operated farms is decreasing. For example,
Pennsylvania lost 2,000 farms between 1997 and 2002,
but gained 1,000 farms operated by women (Economic
Research Service 2004). Given the steady decrease of
farms in the US over the past decades this pattern begs for
explanation. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the rise in the
number of women in farming parallels the dramatic rise in
the number of organic and sustainable farming operations
and farmers markets in the United States (Greene 2000;
Trauger 2001).
Women-operated farms differ from mens in several
important ways. Women tend to operate smaller farms;
tend to be involved in livestock production; and are less
likely to be the primary operator of farms that produce

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major commodities such as dairy, cotton, corn, soybeans,

and hogs (USDA 2002). Some women farmers engage in a
type of agriculture that is different from conventional
and commodity farming, and women farmers involvement
with organic and local foods movements is well documented (DeLind and Ferguson 1999; Hassanein 1999;
Meares 1997; Liepins 1998; Trauger 2004).
In this paper we investigate the following questions: (1)
What models of entrepreneurship are women practicing on
sustainable small and medium sized farms? (2) What
motivates women to engage in these kinds of agricultural
enterprises? and (3) Do women express a connection
between their practice of agriculture and particular articulations of gender identity? This research was undertaken in
partnership with the Pennsylvania Womens Agricultural
Network, an outreach program designed to create educational and social networking opportunities for women
farmers. In the following section, we discuss some new
types of entrepreneurship in agriculture and draw some
connections between agricultural innovations and the
articulation of gender identities.

The cultural economies of civic agriculture

New types of entrepreneurship on farms increasingly
emphasize local food systems as a strategy of resistance to
the commodification, industrialization and globalization of
the food system (Hinrichs 2000, 2003; Feenstra 2002;
Allen et al. 2003). Lyson (2004) refers to these new types
of local food systems as civic agriculture, or the process
of building local markets through direct sales to consumersmarkets which are designed to promote community
social and economic development in ways that commodity
agriculture cannot (Lyson and Guptill 2004). The kinds of
enterprises that are most likely to promote social and
economic development are those that connect producers
and consumers through direct marketing or locality-based
food processing and procurement. Examples include
community gardens, farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), box schemes, and pre-ordered
and bulk meat purchases, among many other innovative
marketing strategies (Ross 2005).
Both men and women are involved in the kinds of
enterprises that link producers to consumers, but women
and men tend to play different roles in these systems. These
roles also differ (to some extent) from the traditional
gender roles of women and men in conventional agriculture
(Feldman and Welsh 1995, Hassanein 1997; Peter et al.
2006, Trauger 2004). It is well documented that women are
expected to, and often do, play supportive and reproductive
roles in traditional agricultural work cultures (Sachs 1983;
Fink 1986; Whatmore 1991; Jellison 1993; Neth 1995;

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Shortall 1999,). In sustainable agricultural systems, however, the construction of masculinity and femininity, and
their relationships to work roles and decision making, are
shifting.
Women in sustainable agriculture are more likely to take
on non-traditional productivist roles, with primary responsibilities for the work and decision making related to
business development and management, resource allocation, production of crops and livestock, marketing of
products, and development of new value-added businesses.
For example, Trauger (2004) found that women farm
operators are more likely to engage in sustainable agriculture because they were supported and affirmed in their
identities as farmers in the sustainable agriculture community. Peter et al. (2006) linked this trend to the performance
of new gender identities in sustainable agriculture for both
men and women.
These changes are not total or transformative, however,
as women still shoulder the burden of domestic work in
addition to taking on more of the productive work of the
farm (Sachs 1996; Brandth 2002). Meares (1997) also
found that the additional work of interfacing with the
community added to an already onerous work burden for
women. In contrast, men developed a sense of community
with other farmers, and felt empowered by their relationships with others.

Gender and models of entrepreneurship

The trend of womens increasing involvement in farming
parallels womens increasing involvement in business in
general. In 2002, women owned 28% of the business firms in
the US, and the number of women-owned businesses
increased 20% from 1997 to 2002 (US Small Business
Administration 2006). Despite the growth in numbers of
women-owned businesses, entrepreneurship continues to be
viewed as the province of men. Lewis (2006) argues that
entrepreneurs are coded as male, although this definition of
entrepreneurs as male is rarely explicitly articulated. The
dominant discourse of entrepreneurship focuses on heroic
masculinism (Lewis 2006), with entrepreneurs defined as
risk takers, leaders and rational planners (Bruni et al. 2004).
Some scholars argue that women business owners
challenge the definition of successful entrepreneurship.
Fenwick (2003) suggests that womens businesses create
new possibilities for alternative models of enterprise and
entrepreneurship. For example, Lee-Gosselin and Grise
(1990) argue that women prefer enterprise models with
small and stable businesses that bring a better workfamily
balance. Nevertheless, some women entrepreneurs deny the
impact of gender on their businesses (Lewis 2006). Lewis
finds that some women entrepreneurs, who believe in

Our market is our community

meritocracy and gender neutrality in the business world,

silence gender and emphasize their similarity to male
entrepreneurs. However, when women disproportionately
engage in alternative economic practices that emphasize
community, family and innovative business models, it
highlights the conventional association of masculinist
economic rationality with market and profit orientation
(Nelson 1995; Mellor 1997,) that some women reject.
Economy, society and civic agriculture
Civic agriculture exists between market and society
(Wright 2006, p. 226, emphasis in original) and is intended
to re-embed social and economic activities in localities
(Delind 2002). Lest the picture of civic agriculture be
painted too rosy, however, critics have pointed to the ways
in which civic agriculture has been idealized. Brodt et al.
(2006) suggest that while some farmers are actively
engaged in building local communities, many sustainable
and conventional farmers are socially and geographically
isolated from their communities. Hinrichs (2000) points out
that power and privilege are not evenly distributed in the
locality-based food systems, and often the more privileged
upper-middle class consumer wields power over the
struggling farmer and lower class consumers. Perhaps more
importantly, DeLind (2002) cautions against an easy conflation of local agriculture with the public good, when
production and consumption of food are still very much
embedded in market relations and pre-existing social
inequalities.
DeLind (2002) is concerned that an agriculture that
connects producers to consumers in direct marketing relationships does not necessarily create a wider public good
and argues that, indeed, there is a danger in equating
production and consumption, responsible or otherwise,
with citizenship (p. 218). In her view, agriculture cannot
produce anything for civil society unless it is both
embodied or material, and explicitly public or collective. In other words, true civic agriculture must connect
farming and its material benefits and consequences (e.g.,
individual bodily health, emotional connection, and physical labor) to the people who inhabit a particular place
what Lyson (2004) identified as improvements to the
problem-solving capacity of a community (p. 63). DeLind (2002, 2006) argues that public space (e.g., the farm
or the market) is a requirement for fostering this soil
citizenship where community members can have a stake
and role in the production of public goods (e.g., public
health and safety) through agriculture (p. 223).
Civic agriculture is characterized in the literature by
complementary and embedded social and economic
strategies that provide economic benefits to farmers at
the same time they ostensibly provide socio-

45

environmental benefits to the community. The kinds of

benefits civic agriculture can provide to a community
include cleaner water through reduced chemical use,
fresher food through direct marketing, and tighter relations between producers and consumers through short
supply chains. The gap in the literature lies in identifying the specific mechanisms through which these benefits
can be produced, and how characteristics of the farmers
themselves (such as gender) can condition the production
of benefits. In this paper, we explore the ways in which
22 women farmers in Pennsylvania practice agriculture
and how their farms became spaces for public work in
ways that furthered civic objectives. We further explore
whether and how gender identity shaped the decision of
these women farmers to engage in new models of
entrepreneurship.

Methods and methodologies

This research is based on fieldwork with female owner/
operators of financially successful and exemplary small to
medium-sized farms in Pennsylvania conducted between
October 2005 and October 2006. The study area was
chosen because of the growing number of women farmers
in the state. As noted earlier, Pennsylvania gained 1,000
farms operated by women between 1997 and 2002,
concurrent with a loss of 2,000 male-operated farms
(ERS 2004). The state also has a high level of activity
related to sustainable agriculture, such as a history of
hosting activities associated with the Pennsylvania
Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), a
regionally significant sustainable agriculture organization
with over 3,500 members. In addition, Pennsylvania has
the largest rural population (2.8 million) of any US state
(NEMW 2004).
This research is part of a broader effort to understand
and provide educational programs to women living and
working on small and medium-sized farms in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Womens Agricultural Network
(PA-WAgN), a research and extension program affiliated
with The Pennsylvania State University, was founded in
2003 by women farmers and agricultural professionals,
including some of the authors of this paper, working in
various non-profit, university and governmental organizations in Pennsylvania. PA-WAgN is loosely based on the
Vermont and Maine Womens Agricultural Networks. The
membership of PA-WAgN has grown rapidly since its
founding in 2003 and counts over 900 members as of
November 2007. Our activities with this organization focus
on integrating research, outreach, and educational efforts to
better understand and meet the educational and networking
needs of women farmers in Pennsylvania.

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We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with

22 women farmers on small and medium-sized (farm
sales \ $250,000) farming operations in Pennsylvania.1
Most (15) women we interviewed were members of PAWAgN. The primary selection criteria for participation in
the interviews included the operation of a successful small
to medium-sized farm and some recognition for this success among educators, organizational personnel, and/or
peers. Everyone we contacted agreed to participate in the
study. Participants were identified based on recommendations from sustainable agriculture organizations and
Cooperative Extension personnel. As the research was
supported by the USDA to help the agency better support
small and medium sized farms, we sought a purposeful
sample of successful entrepreneurs with a variety of
operations, including small grains, dairy, fruit and vegetables and mixed operations.
We used in-depth interviews as a way to efficiently
gather information-rich data on a population which is largely invisible and for whom very little qualitative data
exist (Patton 2002; Sachs 1983). Two individuals conducted all the interviews, and routinely met to review the
conduct of the interviews. We asked respondents to tell us
about their entrepreneurial activities, marketing and livelihood strategies, their use of sustainable agricultural
practices, the type of information and educational programs
they sought, barriers to successful farming, and their
involvement with agricultural organizations and networks.
We interviewed 10 women who farmed independently and
12 women who farmed in partnership with their spouses or
others.2 The interviews were conducted at the respondents
farms and were between 1 and 2 h in length. We transcribed the interviews using codes for farming history,
production practices, marketing strategies, education,
organization involvement, barriers, opportunities, gender
identity, livelihood strategies, current and future needs,
sustainability, decision-making, motivations and community. The coding was done in an iterative process designed
to identify common and recurring themes as well as outlying trends. Two of the authors coded the transcripts
separately to enhance quality of the analysis.

Three of the women we interviewed were operators of farms with

more than $250,000 in sales, but had only recently expanded to this
size. We included them because we felt they would be able to
demonstrate avenues toward growth and expansion of smaller farming
operations.
2
Institutional Review Board authorization was granted for this
project (IRB # 21532) and consent to participate was obtained
through the signing of informed consent forms. All names are
pseudonyms, and other potentially identifying information was
removed.

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Our market is our community: women farmers

and civic agriculture
The women farmers we interviewed engaged in a variety of
production, management, and value-seeking strategies. The
majority of farmers combined these strategies with a
commitment to providing public goods to various communities in their local regions, including their customers,
neighbors, school districts, low-income communities, and
ethno-religious minority groups. We identified three types
of farmer strategies that combined economic and social
imperatives: (1) using educational programs to add value to
farm products, (2) making the farm (or farm-based experiences) a product for consumption, and (3) fostering
locality-based food systems. These strategies balanced and
integrated the economic imperatives of the farm with the
social imperatives of communities through the production
of public goods, such as education, nutrition, and health.
The following is a detailed discussion of the mechanisms
through which farmers used these three strategies that
combine economic and social goals.

Education as a way to add value

Some of the farmers we interviewed creatively combined
their production efforts with on-farm education for
consumers, children, or community members. These
entrepreneurial efforts had multiple motivations including
increasing income, building trust, developing loyal customers, and educating the non-farm community about
farming. Eight women farmers in our sample provided
educational programs on their farms as a strategy to
diversify their incomes and increase their profits. Often, the
value extracted from educational programs far exceeded
the value that could be added to food products. Two
farmers in our sample had developed agricultural camps,
four had developed non-profit educational centers on their
farms, and two regularly held educational programs as part
of a direct marketing strategy. All eight connected their
decision to provide educational programs to the desire to
provide a community good or service, and we focus here on
four exemplars.
Exemplar #1: Rose
Rose, who previously operated a dairy enterprise, currently
runs a farm camp for girls. Raised on a dairy farm, she
decided she wanted to farm on her own. She rented land
and built up a herd of 60 milking cows. A few years later,
she sold her herd because, what I was unprepared for at
the ripe old age of 23 was the isolation. It was just me and
the girls (cows). I was just unprepared for being by myself

Our market is our community

for such long periods of time. So about 10 years ago, she

decided to start a farm camp for girls, with her main
motivation being a desire to recreate the experience of
being able to make my own discoveries in a very
nurturing environment. So I felt it important to
recreate that nurturing environment as an extension
of the nurturing that goes on between a cow and a calf
and between a ewe and a lamb. Also I think the girls
need to have positive female mentoring. So those
were some of the reasons why I felt it important to
keep this an all girls program.
Rather than selling a farm product, Rose sells the idea of
her farm, and the experience of the place. So I guess what
I am selling or how I make my money is I am selling a
notion of sorts. I am selling camaraderieYou know that
is what gets people to come here and spend money.
Another approach for educating consumers and community members is the development of non-profit
educational centers at the farm. As noted above, the value
extracted from educational programs often exceeded that
from food products, and creating on-farm educational
centers also reduces the costs associated with transporting a
farm product to a market. One woman and her husband
operate a non-profit educational center at their 30 acre herb
farm, and with their educational strategy, they are able to
extract value multiple times and in different ways from the
same farm product. Wendy describes their operation.
We have our non-profit educational facility. We grow
herbs for use in value added products. We sell herb
plants and we have educational classes about using
herbs So it is kind of like from the ground up. We
grow the herbs and then use them in many, many
facets on the farm.
While it would be easy to reduce these practices to the
merely economic, the value placed on saving or making
money is inseparable from the social benefits of bringing
customers, who also happen to be citizens of the community, to the farm. Wendy adds that these classes have the
effect of making the farm and surrounding environment
matter to the community.
Our main goal is to connect people to the land and
help them appreciate that. If it is through natural
hygiene products or if it is salsa class where they are
going to be growing the herbs and vegetables, if it is a
school group that learns about how important the
watershed is and how to protect it, you know that is
where we are at.
Nonprofit status enables Wendy and her husband to receive
grant funding for their educational programs, which is an
additional economic strategy unique to educational centers,

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but also reflects the orientation of their values. Rather than

make the largest possible profit by farming fence-row to
fence-row, they combine multiple strategies to earn a
sustainable livelihood.
Exemplar #2: Risa, Brenda, and Katy
Similarly, in a metropolitan area, three women joined
together to create a nonprofit organization using their farm
to teach and advocate for urban agriculture and food selfreliance in urban areas. Their mission statement is:
to model, teach, and promote sustainable urban
agriculture as a means of revitalizing the earth. We
talk about ecology and we talk about social justice
and building community. We talk about health and
well-being and food security (Risa).
They received a grant to develop edible school yards at
inner-city schools, and their motivations for working with
local schools have little to do with earning profits or even
with contributing to the financial success of their own farm.
Their aim is to provide an income for themselves, but also
to contribute to a greater public good, and one that extends
far into the future through facilitating healthy and local
eating habits in children. As Brenda explains,
I was just reading an article in USA Today. It was
from yesterday and it says every baby that was born
in 2000, one out of three is going to be diabetic if we
do not changedrastically change all of the fast
foodif we can capture little kids and get them to eat
edible flowers and touch and smell and taste herbs
and I mean that is really something.
Two other women who farm together discuss how their
farm has evolved over time to encompass education as a
non-profit organization.
We see our farm as an educational site and that has been
an evolution for us. It was originally to just do the horse
driving lessons and how to handle horsesOur vision went
from working with draft horses and teaching driving and
teaching horsemanship toseeing a bigger picture of a
whole bunch of small people on small farms creating an
identity for themselves and a safe place for themselves and
their families to grow and maintain themselves. That is
where we are going. (Katy)
Now they seek to bring people to their farm in an effort to
educate people about farming. Just recently, over 2,500
people came to their farm for a holiday festival. As Ann says,
These are educated people, but they are educated in
their world. They know nothing about this world.
Making them come here, they can make the connectionsGoing to a farmers market is fine, but they

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still do not connect it to where their food is coming

from.
The education all of these women provide about food and
farming in these various contexts contributes to a broader
understanding and appreciation for health and nutrition,
open-space and the environment, and empowerment. The
public goods articulated in this process relate to preserving
farming as a way of life, protecting the environment and
connecting consumers with producers, all well-rehearsed
objectives of sustainable agriculture, but these women also
talk about empowering young girls, preventing disease,
creating safe places for families, and providing healthy
food for families in economically depressed areas. In all
cases, the provision of education is a value-added practice
designed to either contribute to the bottom-line of the farm
and/or contribute to the financial well-being of the farm
owner-operator. The farm itself is a destination for the
educational experience, an integral part of the product
being consumed and a location for production and
consumption of public goods.

The farm as community center

Because farms are a natural setting for learning more about
food and agriculture, many women farmers have begun to
develop their farms as community centers. When these
women farmers spoke about building community, they
often had different types of communities in mind. For
example, some are building communities of like-minded
consumers, others are supporting religious communities,
including religious minorities, and others are interested in
building communities of women. Many of these efforts to
build communities are intricately tied to entrepreneurial
endeavors to build their businesses. This strategy both
reduces farm costs associated with labor and transportation
and creates value based on the experience of interacting
with other like-minded people. In addition, the experience
of community on the farm is often only indirectly related to
food or agricultural products, and has more to do with
belonging, connection to others and safety.
Exemplar #3: Emily, Jill, and Sara
Emily describes developing a u-pick operation on her farm
to reduce labor costs associated with picking produce, but
also to encourage people to linger and enhance their
experience of the farm.
it really becomes like a community-meeting place
and you do not have that many placesYou know
that became the town meeting place and it was this
really, really neat thing. People tell me it has a really

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therapeutic effect on them just being able to come out

and getting the fresh air and being under the open sky
and feel the sun and be picking in the garden. People
really like doing that at the end of their day. So I
think it has that role of bringing people together and
being a meeting place.
While not explicitly articulated by this farmer, a happy
customer is a loyal customer, and consumers will pay
with repeat business for an experience such as the one
Emily describes. This is suggested by Jill, who conducts
educational classes on such topics as
herbology or healthy snacks or biodiesel or like a
weed walk or something that brings people here for a
reason other than the food, but complements their
reasons for being here. So to serve as a resource to the
community and it does not take much of our time. We
enjoy doing it and basically it is like a win, win situation. We definitely tried to create an atmosphere
where people would come and stay and would not
just come and pick up their vegetables and leave.
Another farmer has recently started a program in conjunction
with a local community center to bring children with
behavioral or academic problems to the farm. As Sara
describes:
They come from families who either are lacking in
the way of resources or life skills and most of them
are low income. Some of their situations are pretty
bad. You know like abuse, situations of abuse,
neglect, and povertyI was worried about what was
going to happen to them over the summer months
because they go back to their families full time. So I
suggested that we start a program on the farm over
the summer months to support them and incorporate
hands on organic farming and nutrition.
The farm youth program is supported by grants that Sara
wrote, so she is able to pay herself a salary for these activities.
For her, the farm is not just a resource for securing her own
livelihood; it is, in her own words, a resource for the
community. It is a resource in terms of providing support
for people, but also as a resource for people to utilize as a way
to improve their lives and improve the community. In this
case, a safe and nurturing environment for children that
focuses on health and nutrition are the public goods that
accrue to this community.
Exemplar #4: Elena, Robin, and Ann
Similarly, Elena sees her diversified livestock farm as a
safe and nurturing place, but in this case for women to
learn about farming.

Our market is our community

I think it is a good place for women I mean I have

had male apprentices, too. Do not get me wrong, but
it is a really good place for young women to get to
come and see you can do thisI really want the farm
to be breathing. I do not want it to just be its own
little insulated thing. So I would like it to be something where people can come and learn and vision
new possibilities for themselves just by having been
able to see somebody doing something that they can
adapt for themselves and participate in.
These intangible experiences of visioning are echoed in
other kinds of values associated with the experience of a
particular place, such as the facilitation of spiritual
experiences. For example, Robin, who runs a farm camp
for kids and a maple syrup operation, thinks of her farm as,
a space for people to come toI know a lot of
people who here feel a certain They call it different
things. They call it the magic of the journey or the
spirit. A lot of people who have come here over the
years who have really put a lot into the farm and
gotten a lot from it. There have been a lot of spiritual
gatherings here with our meeting (Quaker) or just
camp. The divine aspect of camp, where people are
really connecting to each other and being loving and
supportive.
The farm facilitates the engagement with what she calls
the divine and connects people to each other in ways that
parallel the functions of other civil institutions such as the
church. The farm stands in for and represents these
symbolic interactions and creates public goods that go
beyond the merely nutritive. People are willing to pay for
the experience of communing with each other and with
what they identify as the sacred in that place.
Other farmers open their farms to the community for
similarly intangible but embodied experiences such as
preserving the experience of the farm for future generations. As Ann notes the disappearance of farms and their
replacement by McMansions, she feels that her farm:
provide[s] some connection still to what people
think of some sort of a simpler life. It is not a simpler
life, but maybe it is a less complicated one. So maybe
two steps closer to the land and the earth. We continue to provide the information and inspiration about
that. About food. About seasonality. About plants and
peoples gardens. Things that are more central to the
core, to our hearts, to our bodies. I think that is
probably who we are in this community.
While deeper connections to the land, the spiritual or
the community are benefits that are difficult to measure
and discern, as Ann points out, they are all embodied

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experiences and contribute to the education of people about

the value of agriculture to the community.
What all these livelihood strategies (u-pick operations,
at-risk youth programs, mentoring programs, facilitation of
spiritual or emotional experiences) have in common is their
contribution to both the financial well-being of the farm
operation and the production of a particular public good
(nutrition, education, emotional health, spiritual health).
The farm becomes a location for engaging with something
that goes beyond food and agriculture, that brings value to
the lives of customers, future farmers and the community at
large. The public is willing and able to pay for these
experiences, and consume the farm itself. As a result, the
farmers create a greater public good from their entrepreneurial activities.

Locality-based food systems

One of the key strategies for bringing consumers to the
farm is CSA operations. CSAs typically involve membership based on a seasonal fee, ranging from about $250 to
$600 per share of food produced depending on the length
of the season and the types and range of products that are
available. Often CSA farmers resell products (cheese,
meat, milk, eggs, bread, jams, jellies, etc.) produced by
other farmers as a service to their customers and as a valueadded strategy. They realize that their customers value
locally produced foods and capitalize on these values by
integrating a retail enterprise into their CSA operation.
This has the benefit of grounding the experience of the
CSA in a larger community of farmers and connecting the
consumer to a farm, and a farmer and ultimately, a locality.
Exemplar #5: Ann, Ginger and Molly
For example, Ann, a farmer with a large CSA of about 150
members, capitalized on the number of people coming to
her farm each week by providing them with other products
they wanted, and contributed to the financial well-being of
neighboring farmers. She explains how
all of those people come to the farm on a weekly
basis, it also increased the traffic and the market for
more local foods because if people were coming to
get their fruits and vegetables, they would also want
bread and yogurt and eggs and cheese. So we began
searching and creating more and carrying more vendors. Then a couple of years later we added people
who were local regional meat producers and we
invited them to be able to come and sell to customers
as a service to our customers to allow them to be able
to do one-stop shopping.

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For Ann, this was a service to both her community and her
fellow producers. For other farmers, the CSA model
provides a welcome change to their previous direct
marketing at farmers markets. Ginger and her husband
previously sold all their farm products at marginally
profitable farmers markets, but now they sell everything
at their farm which saves them the transportation costs of
bringing produce to customers. Ginger says that her
customers are willing to drive to the farm, sometimes
from an hour one-way because:
a lot of people say I want to know who grew my
food. I want to know where it comes from. I do not
want to go to the grocery storeI think the big
ag[riculture] things are scaring people. The strawberries a few years ago and the spinachand the
bovine growth hormone. I think people are more
aware. I have young couples who are not necessarily
wealthy who come in the driveway and they say I do
not want to feed my kids that stuff.
Providing safe and nutritious food to the community is a
service farmers are happy to provide as it also ensures them
a livelihood, and one that also gives people what they want
and need. Molly says that she and her husband revolutionized their business when they realized that people wanted
as much of the food as they could buy from local sources
and farmers they knew.
We rented a building there and we had a fruit stand,
but we realized that we could not make enough
money therepeople were looking for large quantities of things at very low prices like potatoes and
bushels of things. After having sold in [the city], we
realized that we thought the way to make enough
money was to be selling to people by the pound you
know and selling to people their weekly groceries
rather than a wholesale business.
For Molly and her husband, responding to the needs and
wants of their customers has had financial benefits beyond
the weekly grocery sales, as she illustrates in the
following.
The consumers have been one of the things that we
have relied on for finances because we have a whole
system of what we call turnip notes where people can
invest and we pay them twice a year. We pay them an
interest on the investment. We have raised hundreds
of thousands of dollars that way. I mean some people
have invested as much as $40,000.
Some of this investment helped this farm couple start a
cooperative that connects many producers to the urban
markets of a nearby large city, as well as provides other

123

local farmers with a steady market for their products

throughout and beyond the growing season.
The question of what exactly constitutes local food is a
difficult one to answer, and all the farmers quoted above
sell to consumers located some distance from their farms.
For their customers, however, the meaning of local is
wrapped up in knowledge of the farmer and the location of
production, as evidenced by an exchange Ginger had with a
customer.
She said, well I know you are buying this stuff [from
other farmers]. Well yes it is November. It is from [a
growers cooperative]. Right. It is from [a growers
cooperative] and I will tell you who they all are. Every
box has a label. I tell them where everything comes
from and then they are okay with that. They just want to
know where it came from (emphasis added).
Exemplar #6: Molly, Annette, and Katy
Similarly, another farmer caters to a Muslim community
interested in purchasing goats from local farms for religious reasons. Sally explains the interest in buying a goat
from a known source, and how providing the goat just the
way the customers want it adds up to a profit for her farm.
he wanted an uncastrated, undisbutted, no ear tags.
He needed an unblemished animalSo he wants to
actually butcher them and face them towards the East
and say Allah. Well then this year he brings his
brothers and his uncle and now they want to bring
their friends I will sell them all a goat.
Sally gladly provides a service to the ethno-religious
community near her (which is also a minority group living
in uneasy tension with the locals in this area), and in the
process secures for herself a steady and reliable market.
Annette and Katy, farmers in a suburban community and
facing severe development pressure, state the social and
economic connections of their business practices in very
simple terms, Our market is our community.
Farmers who respond to the particular food needs and
wants of their customers are able to gain substantial
financial benefits from this practice. They use the farm as
both a venue for selling products (their own and others) and
for facilitating an experience that meets a social need
beyond nutrition, such as reassuring customers about the
origins of their foods, or providing culturally appropriate
foods for ethnic groups. The practice of meeting these
needs with local, healthy or appropriate foods benefits
farmers at the same time that it contributes to a greater
well-being in the community and in individual people. The
connections between selling a product and providing an
experience are intertwined and, in many cases, inseparable.

Our market is our community

While it is evident in all these cases that these women

farmers intend to provide some kind of social good for the
community, it is not automatically evident whether or how
they connect this social consciousness to the lived experience of womanhood. In the following section, we will
outline whether and how gender identity is connected to
their agricultural practices.

Does gender matter?

The majority of respondents repeatedly brought up how
their gender affected their decisions and choices, particularly with respect to barriers and problems they had faced.
Three-quarters of the interviewees (17) articulated a specific
connection between gender and business practices. As predicted by the literature on women in business, the remaining
five women farmers tended to silence issues of gender
identity when discussing their businesses. These five women
never mentioned their identities as women throughout the
course of the interview, and did not connect their business
practices explicitly to any performance of gender.
For most respondents, the discussion of gender begins
with articulating a feeling of not being taken seriously as
farmers in their community. Most of the women farming
alone (or with other women) reported experiencing some
degree of sexism when seeking financial support, purchasing equipment or attempting to integrate into the local
farming community. For example, Annette, in a confrontation with loan officers, eventually asked if she and her
sister were being denied funding because they defied the
traditional definition of a family farm. She relates that she
finally said to them, if I had a husband sitting across here,
other than my sister, would we be recognized? For other
women, the exclusionary nature of rural and agricultural
communities meant being denied credibility, and ultimately, the long-term support of their community. Rose
says she did not experience
the camaraderie that I would see exhibited by
farmers. I mean they were male. I did not see that
extend in my direction necessarily. I know that I was
told that when I first started farming that at the local
feed mill they were taking bets as to how long I
would lastthe longest bet was six months.
Similarly, Brenda and Risa, domestic and business partners, experienced a lack of support from farmers in their
urban market which directly relates to their non-conformity
in multiple ways, not the least of which is their gender.
Then I think some of the other farmers at market [think]
because we are also small, we grow different weird
things. That is one of the things. I like to play with the

51

catalogues. We cant compete with the farmers that are

bigger than us. So we grow weird things and some of
the farmers just come over and look at what we had and
you know, they are like, I want to see how long these
chicks are going to stick around.
Katy and Annette, who have a non-profit educational
program on their farm, felt that the discrimination they
experienced was directly tied to their alternativeness in
the agricultural community.
I do not know if we are discriminated against because
we are women or we are discriminated against because
we are looking at a different definition of women in
farming. I think if we were doing production farming
and we were taking our potatoes to the farm market and
this was a farm that we had inherited from our parents
so that we did not have the big bills of purchasing the
farm, we probably would fit in better (Katy).
Women farmers attribute their marginalization to the
combination of their lack of conformity to traditional
gender roles and their choice to practice agriculture outside
of the commodity farming system.
Rather than being solely a liability, however, many
women relate this experience of non-conformity as a creative exercise, one that capitalizes on both the strengths of
their identity as women and their abilities to exploit new
opportunities in their communities. Holly connects this to
the gendering of social skills and how this can be a boon to
women in farming, especially those engaged in more civic
kinds of agriculture, such as CSA. CSAs are a really great
opportunity for women to use the skills that women seem
to have in terms of being community-oriented and having
people skills. Ann also relates this to concerns that are
cultural and financial at the same time, and very
contemporary.
I think what is growing are these kind of smaller
creative enterprises. You know they are often either
spin offs from the business or you know women have
good instincts. There is an intuition. Not that men are
not intuitive. I do not mean to imply that, but I think
that they see an opportunity here. I think as a culture
the things that they are seeing are being valued and
desiredthey see just kind of logical extensions from
milk to cheese. From this bread to another bread. I
mean one part of it is home arts and part of it is our
nurturing sort of thing. I think part of it is our creativity. In part it is the opportunity that is being created
by the market place. I think in part it is Martha
Stewart in a sort of tangential way. You know
bringing pride back into the home and valuing seasonality in our gardens and our table and our food and
the quality of it.

123

52

A. Trauger et al.

For Ann, this new consumer lifestyle that emphasizes highquality food is due to the sensitivities of women to the
needs of the table and health, and the limitations of the
conventional food supply to meet those needs. Elena
observes that women not only notice the problems of the
conventional agricultural system, but also are the first to
take the initiative in changing it.
I think a lot of people are sort of realizing that we are
going to hell in a handbasket the way our economic
situation is and the way we live, our chemical
intensity, including fossil fuels and a lot of people are
saying stop the bus, I want to get off. They are
more looking at quality of life I think. Men are happy
to get off the bus too more often than not, but they
would not be the one to say so. So I think the women
may be are leading a little bit in that.
As acknowledged by these women, the decision to get off
the bus and make changes to the agricultural system in
ways that produce public as well as market goods, is not
necessarily tied to sexual difference. Rather, it reveals the
social construction of gender identities that are (re)inforced
in various ways in agricultural communities. As illustrated
by Madeline, who articulates a prevailing gender stereotype in agriculture, and points out that it exists even for
women who are leaders and recognized on a national scale
for their contributions to sustainable agriculture.
[Well known woman farmer] was identified as wife
of dairy farmer. [Of] all of the people who do not
deserve to be identified as wife of, it is she. She is
more of a farmer than her husband is. To me that is
social stereotyping just because a woman stands up
and says something or is involved in some way she is
automatically being classified as wife of the farmer.
Other respondents did not mention gender or explicitly
silenced it. This is not to say that the experience of
femininity or masculinity is not a reality in their lives, but
that they do not explicitly link gender ideologies to the
shape of their work lives. When asked about whether she
seeks out women for information specifically, Robin says
that it matters,
not so much whether it is a man or a woman. Just
that you know we can share information about how
things are done, but I do not think gender really
matters that much to me. I guess I have been sort of
surrounded by men most of my life with three older
brothers and then having three sons and I am really
comfortable working with males.
For others, the silencing of gender is related to a concern
with being seen as a successful business person. When
asked about gender discrimination from male farmers in

123

the goat business, Kelly suggests that their treatment of her

reflects her efforts to be successful, practical and experienced. For her, she deserves equal treatment and thus,
receives it. She related that,
all they want to hear about is goats. How much are
you making? They say, oh my gosh. You are making
that kind of money. We do not make the kind of
money. They saw that I understood and they were
fascinated that I knew as much as I did about goats
and I was really projecting that if you want good
quality milk and you want a good milker, you have to
have a good structure. You have to have a good
background. You have to have a good foundation.
Others relate their experience of gender only to differences
in education, and as Nancy, who is 48, explains the older I
get, the less I see myself as easily identifying with women
farmers. She explains that while women may have special
needs for knowledge, such as how to drive tractors or
change the oil, it is not that we are a woman. It is because
that is not what we spent our childhood doing. It was just
not something that we ever learned. We know how to do
other things. And, like Kelly, she feels that rewards
should be proportional to contribution and not related to
any kind of cultural identity.
We also have to feel that we do not get special
privilege because we are a woman. Being a woman
farmer does not mean that everybody treats us nicer,
we are people and people have to respect that, male,
female, black, white, or whatever. We all should meet
a certain criteria of ability and interest in working
hard.
For most of the women we interviewed, gender was
acknowledged as an organizing principle in terms of
divisions of labor, experiences with the community, and
obtaining education. The majority of women we interviewed explicitly connected their gender to their choices to
engage in civic agriculture, while others denied its
relevance. About three-quarters of the women we interviewed had experienced some form of discrimination in
traditional male networks. This discrimination was related
to resisting the traditional gender norms of agricultural
communities and the perceived threat to traditional meanings of agriculture through the practice of more civic forms
of farming.

Conclusions
We set out to understand the strategies that female operators of small to medium-sized farms in Pennsylvania use to
be successful in a difficult economic environment for

Our market is our community

farmers. We found that the women farmers we interviewed

respond to social and cultural needs in their communities as
a way to be successful. These strategies fall under the
category of a larger movement in agriculture that has been
identified as civic agriculture (Lyson 2004). The farmers
we interviewed use their market-based activities to meet
social needs, such as safe spaces for children; and spiritual
connections to nature, healthy food, and culturally specific
foods. As DeLind (2002) suggests, these women also
practice civic agriculture in ways that are both public and
embodied. The public in this civic work is multi-tiered. On
one level, the public receiving the benefits are the primary
consumers and their immediate relatives. While many of
the women farmers we interviewed engaged with the
public as good business practice, they also saw their work
in Delinds (2002) words as a purposeful and enlightening
public obligation in its own right (p. 219). On another
level, the pubic benefitted from increased public health,
safety, and social connections. Many of these farmers also
strive to provide public education through providing people
with direct physical engagement with the practice of
farming.
The embodied or material benefits and consequences
(e.g., safe, healthy food) of civic agriculture are a product
of the physical work of farmers and material exchanges
between farmers and consumers. The benefits of bodily
health, safe spaces and empowerment, as discussed in the
paper, are directed to a wide variety of people in a wide
variety of contexts including at-risk rural youth, ethnoreligious minorities in suburban communities, and lowincome urban communities. In many cases, the farm itself
became an integral part of the product or service to be
consumed, and as such, the farm became a public space for
civic work.
Women in this study redefined successful farming in
terms of providing services to their community, as well as in
terms of profit and productivity. Parallel to the literature on
gender and business, this is a new model of entrepreneurship, one that subverts the ideologies of economic
rationality and redefines profitability and success in terms of
care, responsibility to the public, and connection to the farm.
Resistance to this redefinition is indicated by the belittling
many of them have received by the conventional and predominately male farming community around them as they
experimented with alternative models of production.
Because we did not interview men, we cannot definitively say that civic agriculture is connected to the
articulation of a particular feminine (vs. masculine) gender
identity, and even those participants that did connect their
identity as women with their choice of agricultural practices were careful to not essentialize this distinction. One
caveat to our study is that we selected women who were
known as successful entrepreneurs on small and medium-

53

sized farms which may have biased our results towards

women who were engaged with their communities. Civic
agriculture, it should also be noted, is not beyond producing its own public bads. Some women specifically
focused on social justice issues, but others did not focus on
problems of race and/or class in their communities. The
geographical location of the farm as a site of civic work is
troublesome as well, because only those willing and able to
pay for the product/service and those willing and able to
travel to the farm have access to this space and its associated public work.
Women often lead the way in innovation on small and
medium-sized farms as business owners and community
leaders, and this is connected to larger-scale movements
forwarding gender equity. The growth of civic forms of
agriculture parallels the trend toward women-owned businesses that change the realities of work as well as the
impact of business on community. Both innovative processes provide economic and social benefits to women
business owners at the same time that they benefit the
community in which they are embedded. While some
women business owners may deny the relevance or
importance of gender to their work, others engage in the
discourse of gender identity in multiple ways. Perhaps most
importantly, they challenge hegemonic gender identities as
evidenced by the shifts in gender roles in sustainable
agriculture.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank United States
Department of Agriculture National Research Initiative and Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education programs for the financial
support of WAgN; all the members of PA-WAgN; the members of the
PA-WAgN working group, Jill Findeis, Ann Stone, Linda Moist; and
especially the women farmers who participated in this study.

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Author Biographies
Amy Trauger is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia. Her doctoral degrees are in
geography and womens studies and her research interests are women
farmers, sustainable agriculture, and social justice. She has conducted
research with women farmers for the past 9 years and is a co-founder
of the Womens Agricultural Network in Pennsylvania. She has
published research articles in the Great Lakes Geographer; Gender,
Place and Culture and the Journal of Social and Economic
Geography.
Carolyn Sachs is a Professor of Rural Sociology and Womens
Studies and Head of the Department of Womens Studies at The
Pennsylvania State University. In 2007, she was Visiting Professor at
the Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome, Italy; and Visiting
Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her research interests
are women and agriculture, gender and development, and sustainable
agriculture. She is the author of three books: Invisible Farmers:
Women in Agriculture Production; Gendered Fields: Women, Agriculture, Environment; and Women Working in the Environment.
Mary Barbercheck is a Professor in the Department of Entomology
at The Pennsylvania State University. Her assigned responsibilities
are in the areas of research in sustainable agriculture, and extension in
pasture and forage entomology. Her research focus is on soil entomology and ecology, effects of agricultural production practices on
soil-dwelling insect pathogens (nematodes and fungi), and soil
arthropod diversity and soil function as relates to system sustainability. She also conducts research in the areas of organic agriculture,
women and gender in agriculture, and science and technology. Her
extension work focuses on the soil food web and soil quality in
agricultural production systems, and integrated pest management in
organic production systems. In addition to authoring scientific papers
published in entomological journals, she co-edited and co-authored
the book, Women in Science and Technology.

Our market is our community

Kathy Brasier is an Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology in the

Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at The
Pennsylvania State University. Her research and extension programs
focus on collective action and networking around agricultural and
environment issues. Specific interests include network effects on
learning and innovation, particularly among farmers using conservation and sustainable practices; the development and activities of
grass-roots community environmental organizations; civic engagement in local land use planning; value-added and sustainable
agricultural production systems; the effects of space and scale on farm
management and environmental decision-making; and spatial data
analysis techniques and their uses in the social sciences. Dr. Brasier
received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin
Madison in 2002.
Nancy Ellen Kiernan is a program evaluator in the Office of the
Director of The Pennsylvania State University Cooperative Extension. She works with field-based educators and faculty to implement

55
program evaluations. Dr. Kiernan has evaluated a wide variety of
programs as has publishes on results and evaluation issues in Evaluation Review, Evaluation and Program Planning, American Journal
of Evaluation, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Preventive Veterinary Medicine, Journal of Dairy Science, American
Journal of Industrial Medicine, International Quarterly of Community
Health Education, Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Education, and Journal of Extension. Dr. Kiernans work has been
recognized with the National Association of Family and Consumer
Sciences (NEAFCS) award for Program Excellence through
Research; the National Institute for Farm Safetys award for Research
Leading to Prevention Programs; Penn States Commission for
Women award for Achieving Women for innovative evaluations; and
the American Evaluation Association (AEA) award for Sustained
Excellence in Extension Evaluation. Her program of research focuses
on the problems of implementing evaluation.

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