7 pgs., In the last couple of decades, nonprofit organizations have worked to advance the voices of American farm women. Using the internet and social media, they advocate for farm women to have a larger voice in local and national agricultural policymaking. The Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN; https://wfan.org/), is one of these nonprofit organizations (Women, Food, and Agriculture Network, 2019b). Based in Iowa, it offers a variety of programs to encourage farm women to continue farming and to consider pursuing elective office for a stronger female voice in American agriculture (Sachs et al., 2016). Historically, the American woman’s contribution to feeding the country and the world has received recognition only during times of national emergency. For example, during World War II, the U. S. Secretary of Agriculture turned to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Extension Service to create a recruitment program for women to assist with food production. As early as April 1943, the U.S. Congress approved funding for The Farm Labor Supply Appropriation Act. The program became known as the Women’s Land Army (WLA; The Farm Labor Supply Appropriation Act of 1943). The program, operational between 1943 and 1947, called on American women to work on abandoned farms during World War II. Lucrative defense-related jobs were luring farmers from their fields, creating a need for farm laborers. The WLA was administered by the USDA and implemented at the state level by the USDA Extension Service. By 1945, one and a half million non-farm women had been recruited for farm jobs, and WLA membership had risen to almost two million women (Rasmussen, 1951, pp. 148–149). During the last decades of the 20th century, social and economic change had encouraged more women, including farm women, to become politically active. It was not until 1978, when the USDA began collecting data on the gender of the principal farm operators (the USDA term to describe the decision-makers), that women’s role in American farming was confirmed with statistics. According to the USDA Census in 2017, women as principal producers on the farm are slowly growing in number (U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2020, Table 52). These numbers also reflect the first time multiple (two or more) primary producers were reported in the USDA Census of Agriculture (U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2020, Table 47).
22pgs, In nine of the last 10 years, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reported that the average funds generated on-farm for farm operators to meet living expenses and debt obligations have been negative. This paper pieces together disparate data to understand why farm operators in the most productive agricultural systems on the planet are systematically losing money. The data-driven narrative we present highlights some troubling trends in US farm operator livelihoods. Though US farms are more productive than ever before, rising input costs, volatile production values, and rising land rents have left farmers with unprecedented levels of farm debt, low on-farm incomes, and high reliance on federal programs. For many US farm operators, the indicators of a “good livelihood”—stability, security, equitable rewards for work—are largely absent. We conclude by proposing three axes of intervention that would help US agriculture better sustain all farmers' livelihoods, a crucial step toward improving overall agricultural sustainability: (1) increase the diversity of people, crops, and cropping systems, (2) improve equity in access to land, support, and capital, and (3) improve the quality, accessibility, and content of data to facilitate monitoring of multiple indicators of agricultural “success.”.
