Men’s work on farms is generally genuinely gruelling and thankless. No question. Yeah, it’s a lot more seasonal and rhythmic than women’s work, but it’s totally not easy.
A lot of farms basically divide gendered work as inside work/outside work. There’s work you do in/around the house (women’s work), and then in the outbuildings and fields (men’s work).
And like, I know this is sexist and that men’s work is given way more prestige, but also, as a disabled woman who grew up on a farm, it made a lot of intuitive sense to me. The closest explanation I can find for my gender literally is “farm wife”. It’s not just an aesthetic, it’s a philosophy and a social role.
In the 1980s the “Farm Crisis” started, and set the new status quo for agriculture. Basically, farming stopped being as profitable as it used to be; it became incredibly hard for independent farmers or family farms to stay in business. You couldn’t just harvest a reasonable crop, sell it, and turn a profit; you either had to farm an incredibly fuckoff huge amount of land, hire incredibly cheap exploited labour, or find new and different ways to add value to your product.
A lot of the new ways to generate profit–for example, turning raw produce into homemade jellies and pies; marketing directly to restaurants; transitioning to organic, sustainable, or non-GMO produce; leaving the farm and getting a stable non-agriculture related job–have primarily fallen to the woman’s role. Business plans, marketing, accounting, and networking are indoor jobs, so a lot of the boring or repetitive parts of them got handed off to women.
But what Dr Taber talks about on her podcast is that she’s a crop scientist; she travels to tons of different farms and does quality control inspections. And when she goes to farms, she sits down with the “management team” (a farmer and his wife, usually) and goes over their business model.
And what she sees, over and over, are farms where the male farmer considers himself “the farmer”, because he drives the tractor and does the Very Important Manly Essential Parts of Farming, and his wife is “helping”, as in, she does all the frivolous extra bits that aren’t too physically strenuous. Except… the wife is essentially running the business. She’s the one who does the books, the marketing, the administration, the record-keeping, makes sure they meet the organic certification requirements, and is the one actually able to answer all the questions necessary for an inspection or audit.
And no one is allowed to acknowledge that the wife is in charge. Because even though, in today’s political climate, the man who drives the tractor is much easier to replace with hired help than the woman running the business, he is The Farmer and must be respected as such. (Dr. Taber recounts the elaborate pantomime that happens during her inspections, where she asks a question, the male farmer muses about it, his wife prompts him, “It’s on page 2, isn’t it, honey?” and the male farmer then answers, “Yeah, page 2.”)
This IS changing–there are more and more farms where men are stepping into “women’s work”, and women are stepping up and claiming the status and authority they’ve traditionally been denied. But there’s also a toxic culture in farming that really, truly believes that only men who drive tractors are Farmers, and therefore no outside opinions–no little wifey with her cute little farmer’s market stall, no crop scientist, nobody–need matter.
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