Women in Agriculture: Not a New Concept

Over the weekend, I attended the first-ever Women's Conference put on by Montana Farmers Union.  It was a really great experience. The speakers were great and very informative, and I got the chance to meet other women in agriculture from around the Great Falls area.

I even got interviewed by a couple Great Falls news stations, which is a first for me.  You can check out one of the interviews here: http://www.krtv.com/news/women-s-farming-conference-in-great-falls-teaches-entertains/.  It's strange to read the article and watch the clip for me- I'm definitely unaccustomed to seeing my name in print, etc. I just hope I represented both sides of my family well.

The second television reporter who interviewed me (from a different station than the one in the link above) asked me, "Why do you think more women are getting into agriculture?" It caught me off guard at the time, and I don't think I had the best response.

After thinking about it, what I would liked to have said is something as follows:

Women have always been involved in agriculture, from the beginning of time, when farming consisted of planting seeds individually in rows you dug with rocks, if you were lucky. In many cultures, women were (and still are) the sole agricultural producers. Even in much of the history of Western Civilization, when women weren't doing the manual labor of farming, they were still the ones cooking, and controlling the food supply of their families. When you're the one preparing the food, you have a concern about the procurement of said food. Needless to say, there is some power involved in being the party who controls the food supply of the family. But that's a digression.

Both sides of my family have agrarian roots. My parents grew up on farms, and on the Bangs side, as you can read in the interview above, Jeff's great-grandmother homesteaded the land our family still farms today. Laura Etta Smalley Bangs "proved up" in 1910, and there were many other women homesteaders in Montana who were courageous enough to do what she did. The idea of women in agriculture is not new.  If anything, it's simply a case where responsibilities have been shifting over time.

It does seem like farming is a lifestyle that follows strict gender roles, traditionally, and that's likely what the reporter was getting at.  This is another reason why I wanted to attend the Women's Conference this past weekend. Though I am not often the person running the machinery on our farm, I think I play a vital role to the success of our operation.  The conference was a great way to learn more about a wide variety of topics encompassed in the general term of "farming." Farming is a unique business and lifestyle in that you are your own accounting department, business manager, human resources department, labor, etc. It definitely takes more than just one gender (men) to make a farm functional and successful. It always has, and it always will.