The Saving Grace:
How Women are Adapting Our Food System to Climate Change

Regenerative agriculture is the ultimate form of collaboration and empathy between people and nature, a partnership many women in the regenerative movement see as vital to the survival of both.

 
By the time I exit I-70 for Oak Grove, Missouri, the storm is an ominous blue mass on the horizon. I’ve been glancing at the clouds in my rearview mirror for the last few hours. Now that Tornado Alley has shifted east and south—potentially a consequence of a warmer Gulf of Mexico—Missouri sees more tornadoes than it used to.ⁱ I’m hoping not to see one this afternoon.

I park at a bustling truck stop. Soon Susan Jaster, farm outreach worker with Lincoln University Cooperative Extension, pulls up in her pickup truck. I hop in and we cruise down narrow corn- and soybean-lined roads that Susan tells me flood regularly. The region experiences more intense rain events now, and the industrially farmed soils around us lack the organic matter needed to absorb the water. This area of Missouri is part of the Corn Belt, a section of the Midwest planted heavily to genetically modified corn-soy rotations. That corn is not what consumers see in the grocery store. Less than 1 percent of the corn grown in this country is sweet corn. Virtually all the corn U.S. farmers plant is dent corn, a variety inedible in raw form to humans but ideal for feeding to livestock. It’s also perfect for converting into ethanol fuel (which is at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive to produce than gasoline, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and National Wildlife Federationⁱⁱ) and processing into unhealthy ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup.ⁱⁱⁱ Same with soybeans: the vast majority of U.S. farmers grow soy for livestock—by far the most common use—and human consumption that requires processing first. 

Susan and I are heading to a farm owned by one of five area women (including Susan) who are using a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant to analyze the relationship between grazing, wild forb and insect biodiversity, and soil health. The two-year study, in its final year when I visit in summer 2021, compares test and control plots within cover crop pastures located on each woman’s farm. The test plots undergo rotational, high-intensity livestock grazing, while the control plots are not grazed. “Cover crop” typically means a temporary crop planted in rotation with cash crops. But because these women primarily raise livestock, their cover crop fields function more like pastures. They do not till or plant the land to cash crops at all. Instead, they seed the fields annually with a cover crop mix, and other plants naturally work their way in. Sometimes covers from previous years return. The women evaluate the plots after each round of livestock impact. 

“We’re looking at what population of plants we have in there, whether it’s some of our cover crops or if it’s wild forbs, or weeds. We’re counting the insects that are on there, and we’re also seeing what relationship of predator to prey bugs that we have. We’re going to try and see from beginning to end of the project if those insects change and those plant communities change,” Susan tells me in an earlier conversation via Zoom. “We come in and do a Solvita test, which is the way to tell how many carbons you’re sequestering, basically. We’re also doing a microBIOMETER test, which tells you the ratio of fungus to bacteria. Those are all things we’re trying to achieve, carbon sequestration and a good balance of bacteria to fungus, for regenerative practices. We’re also doing a water infiltration test, which usually is a good indicator that your soil is getting better.” The goal is to take a holistic view of regenerative practices—to assess the overall effect instead of just one or two outcomes.  

Research is an important part of Susan’s work, but her main job is assisting farmers via Lincoln University Cooperative Extension’s Innovative Small Farmers’ Outreach Program. The program’s mission is to help small farmers and ranchers protect soil, water, and the environment while also boosting their efficiency and profit. The program aims to reach underserved and socially disadvantaged producers in particular, two groups the USDA, extension service, universities, and other agriculture entities have historically ignored. The program also has an urban farming arm that promotes urban agriculture and provides knowledge to those growers. 

As a farm outreach worker since 2009, Susan works with farmers one-on-one, tailoring her advice to their environment and goals. She also speaks publicly and conducts informative workshops. She specializes in sharing innovative ideas related to soil health, clean water, grazing, pasture/field management, livestock, low- to no-chemical use, biological farming, and other regenerative agriculture priorities and practices. All of this work, she tells me, is more urgent in a changing climate. “I feel like in the last four or five years I have finally figured out that is really my point and purpose on this planet: to make sure that people know how to do [regenerative agriculture], so that at least the generations that are on the planet right now will have abundance in their final years and get their children to understand that this is possible,” she says.

One reason Susan is so committed to regenerative agriculture, and so effective at helping farmers understand it, is that she is a farmer and rancher herself. She started in the dairy industry in the early 1980s on a large commercial dairy in Arizona. She continued in Missouri on a 15-cow dairy that she co-owned with her husband, Art. She cared for their three children during those years as well. Since 2010 Susan has raised American Blackbelly sheep, a hair breed that thrives under low-input grazing conditions and also yields high-quality horns and lean meat. At the time of my visit, she has roughly 100 head of sheep, and their home base is the ten acres of pasture and cover crop fields surrounding her house. Susan also rents additional grazing acres that she manages with regenerative practices. 

Renting is a challenge, though, because leases are not guaranteed. Decision-making freedom, wealth accrual for future generations, and the ability to borrow against the land asset are several reasons producers prefer to own. Renting can also complicate conservation. The dominant narrative is that renters are extractive, putting little energy into conservation of land they may only control for short periods of time. But that is not always true, as people like Susan and other regenerative renters I’ve spoken with demonstrate. In some cases, tenants may want to farm or ranch regeneratively, but the landlord may discourage or forbid it, believing it will reduce profit. The situation might also be reversed, with landowners encouraging sustainable practices that tenants reject. What’s needed is a system for matching like-minded landowners and tenants, as well as incentives for landlords to require sustainability and tenants to practice it willingly. Given that roughly 40 percent of U.S. farmland is rented,^iv centering landlord-tenant relationships around sustainability could make a substantial environmental impact. 

And women could play a major role in doing that. Women own almost half of the rented farmland in America, accounting for 37 percent of landlords.^v Research shows that both male and female non-operating landlords care about conservation at roughly equal rates; however, women report less knowledge about and engagement with conservation practices and resources.^vi They often lack the confidence and know-how to dialogue with their tenants about regenerative management. To address this, organizations like American Farmland Trust and the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network offer programming for female landowners focused on sustainability. 

“Particularly in parts of the Midwest, we have high rates of rented land, and much of that land is owned by women, widows or women who have inherited that land, but who are less actively managing it,” says Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, Women for the Land director at American Farmland Trust. “The focus of our early programming was on engaging those women, primarily in conversations around conservation, acknowledging that if we want to get conservation and more resilient practices, regenerative practices, on the landscape, then we need to make sure women are part of that conversation on their rented acres.” Women landowners could also create pathways for young and diverse producers to access land. Land access is the number one barrier for new farmers,^vii so connecting women landowners with young and BIPOC producers could provide unprecedented opportunities for the next generation of agriculturalists.

Susan and I arrive at Dawn Hoover’s house, where Kelly Clark, Cathy Geary, and Sariah Hoover (Dawn’s daughter) also await us. Aside from Cathy and Susan, who’ve farmed most of their lives, the other women fit the USDA definition of “beginning farmer.” Dawn, 67, used to rent all her land to an industrial grain producer, but in the last five years she has operated more and more of it herself. She also manages part of a neighbor’s acreage, with Sariah, 40, helping her. And Kelly, 39, started her diversified ranch almost six years ago with her husband. 

These women are part of a rising collective of women, especially young and diverse women, joining the agriculture industry. Beginning farmers—defined as people who’ve farmed ten years or fewer—make up 27 percent of the country’s 3.4 million producers.^viii Forty-one percent of those beginning producers are women.^ix Among all farmers, 36 percent are women, up from 30 percent in 2012.^x Women enjoy the highest total representation, 44 percent, among American Indian/Alaska Native producers.^xi Overall, women farm or co-farm 43 percent of the nation’s farmland—that’s almost 388 million acres.^xii To sum it up: the number of women in agriculture is growing, especially within the beginning farmer cohort, and women have a say in what happens on almost half the nation’s farmland.

As the clouds darken, the women and I march out to the test plots. “This area down here is only three years from conventional,” Dawn says as we enter the cover crop pasture. “Each year it’s doing better, but this year it’s doing a lot better.” Susan stops at one of the thin yellow poles that serve as transects. “We’ve been inventorying a one-meter square off of these posts,” she says. “We inventory by percentages. Whatever is in there, we write it all down. Like this is black medic right here. It’s a legume, it looks like clover, but it’s a little more veiny. It has all these little lines in it and it has a darker stem usually. It is trying to repair the soil because it needs calcium, it needs some nitrogen, so it’s helping with that. But she’s also got some other things in here, radishes, turnips, some wild forbs. Here’s some wild oats.”

“I had 32 percent fungal bacteria on this area,” Dawn adds, pointing to one of the test areas. “The control plot over there, which you can look at and tell it’s not doing as good, it was 8 percent.” Fungal bacteria may sound nasty, but it’s actually crucial to plant health: fungi cycle nutrients, fix nitrogen, produce beneficial hormones, control pathogens, protect against drought, stabilize organic matter, and decompose plant, animal, and other residue.^xiii Except for Cathy, these women manage land that others farmed industrially in the not-so-distant past, land with essentially no soil life left when they started. Regenerating such land takes time—but not as much as one might think. “My pasture out in front of my property, I’ve taken it back from corn and bean land, and it took every bit of three years to get it to where we had live biological activity in that soil,” Susan tells me earlier. “It can happen quickly, but you have to be purposeful in your actions.” 

An example: Kelly recalls a parasite problem she faced when she first put livestock on her land. Because the ecosystem was so out of whack from decades of industrial farming, parasite numbers jumped high enough to kill animals. A nosy neighbor commented to Kelly’s mother that he couldn’t understand why Kelly and her husband were trying to run animals there. Couldn’t they see the land was dead and needed agrochemicals to fix it? That’s the wrong mentality, Kelly says. “Now I get to regenerate it and figure out how to utilize it,” she says. “Susan saw it from when it started and through this grant and where we’ve been in changing it, and it’s a huge difference. My loss of animals due to parasites has pretty much been nothing this year. This property isn’t dead; it just needed some healing and it needed some time.”

Sexist attitudes persist about a woman’s place in agriculture—even though women built the foundations of food raising and animal husbandry.

The nosy neighbor happened to be a man, and his response to regenerative practices is typical not just in rural Missouri, but in much of America’s farm country. The women are quick to say that regenerative is never anti-male, nor is it woman-only (a sentiment I and other women I’ve spoken to over the years would heartily agree with). But they also acknowledge the pushback from male peers: derogatory comments, accusations of being crazy, dismissals of their work as “not real farming.” I’ve heard that before, and so has Susan. Women and men alike who use regenerative organic practices often receive skepticism and even outright scorn.

Conservatives have branded regenerative agriculture as a liberal agenda, a model farmers ought to reject as anti-business and anti-progress, a threat to their existence. Some farmers shun regenerative agriculture because it is associated with addressing climate change, which many don’t believe in or see as a liberal lie meant to push them out of agriculture. And while I trust this percentage of farmers is small, some do not think long-term and instead adopt a “take all you can, while you can” attitude toward our shared soil resource. Transitioning to regenerative agriculture also involves a stated or unstated admission that industrial agriculture isn’t the best option for producing food in a changing climate—and we all know how hard it is to admit we’re wrong, whether to others or just to ourselves. 

What most farmers do accept is the corn-and-beans mentality, a shorthand reference to grain production relying on tillage or chemical no-till, fertilizers, GMO seeds, cash crop rotations without covers, and other industrial strategies. Why the corn-and-beans mentality reigns is no secret: Big Ag propaganda combined with government programs incentivizing large-scale commodity production convinced farmers they’ll go broke without conventional inputs, a tight focus on yields, and specialization. As rural anthropologist Jane W. Gibson and her colleague Benjamin J. Gray describe it, “Farmers have been ideologically colonized by the values of industrial agriculture.”^xiv

The corn-and-beans mentality is one reason many Midwest farmers react to regenerative practices like the nosy neighbor. Another is the simple fact that Susan, Dawn, Cathy, Kelly, and Sariah are women, and sexist attitudes persist about a woman’s place in agriculture—even though women built the foundations of food raising and animal husbandry. For thousands of years and across the globe, writes Mark Bittman in Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal, women were the primary agriculturalists: planting, seed saving, domesticating animals, developing tools, and determining how to use the land. Men and women divided labor, but “these divisions were not defined by dominance and subservience… it seems likely that roles shifted toward patriarchy as the plow and other heavier equipment that required significant brawn were introduced to farming.”^xv In other words, when farming became more about physical than intellectual work, it also became more male. 

Patriarchal institutions went on to support this development in America. From colonization forward, white men enjoyed the most access to land, credit, and government assistance. And for decades, USDA policies systematically pushed farmers of color, particularly Black farmers, out of agriculture.^xvi Socially, a white male’s right to participate in agriculture went unquestioned. Partly to blame is the rural idyll myth, which casts rural life as romantic and centers the heterosexual white couple and their children as natural farmers. “Under this vision, (white) men are the farmers, and their (white) wives are their helpmates. When the time comes, the farmer’s son inherits the land, and their daughter either disappears from the imagination or is expected to marry a (male) farmer or rancher if she wants to stay in agriculture,” write scholars Ryanne Pilgeram, Katherine Dentzman, and Paul Lewin.

The rural idyll is not only a sexist and racist fiction, but also an inaccurate depiction of the economic reality on most farms. Countless female farmers work full- or part-time nonfarm jobs to ensure a steady income and health insurance. They squeeze farm work into whatever time is left. Pilgeram, Dentzman, and Lewin go on to argue that “part of the work of rewriting women into agriculture is about dismantling this fiction and yet recognizing that it creates real and persistent barriers for anyone who exists somehow outside of the rural idyll trope.”^xvii 

Breaking the extractive, capital-driven mindset of industrial agriculture—seeing through its lies and envisioning something holistic, ecological, nutritious, inclusive, and socially just instead—is perhaps the largest barrier to building a regenerative food system. But over and over, people within the movement tell me women are uniquely talented at removing the Big Ag blinders. Because women often view the world through the context of relationships, many are gifted at thinking holistically. They understand that regenerative agriculture can restore human and biological health together, and revitalize communities and small businesses. It can help address social injustices and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. And it creates opportunities for the next generation. Research shows that women tend to approach problem-solving through collaboration; they lead with empathy rather than domination.^xviii Regenerative agriculture is the ultimate form of collaboration and empathy between people and nature, a partnership many women in the regenerative movement see as vital to the survival of both.

Growing female participation in regenerative agriculture might just create the tipping point needed to pull back the curtain on conventional agriculture and remake the system. “I look at women to be the saving grace on this, because women are more likely to carry out and continue conservation practices, whereas the men tend to look at the dollar signs,” Susan tells me in an earlier conversation. “The women are looking at: How’s that going to be next year if we do it this year? I think that’s why I see getting more women involved will actually change the scope and progression of regenerative ag.”

Just then, Kelly’s cell phone rings; it’s her husband calling to warn her about possible tornadoes in the storm, whose clouds suddenly look quite close and dark. “The weather radios are going off,” she tells us. The wind picks up as we hustle back to Dawn’s house. We chat in the garage until gusts drive the rain in sideways through the open door. Shortly after we retreat to the living room, hailstones drop from the sky and lightning flashes too close to the windows for comfort (mine at least). I’m picturing my rental car back at the truck stop, festooned with dents or a broken windshield. The power goes out and does not come back. 

When the storm finally passes, Susan and I strike off in her truck. We encounter flooded roads, crews fixing power lines, and downed trees, but no signs of a tornado. Susan stops at a badly eroded field, where water has carved deep scars in the hillside and pushed topsoil into a pile near the road. A pool of muddy water sits stubbornly at the hill’s bottom. The field has nothing growing on it; presumably it is “resting” as summer fallow, kept free of all plant life for a season thanks to herbicides. Summer fallow is a practice that provides the opposite of rest; instead, it stresses the soil because soil needs living roots to stay alive and in place. The erosion I see is exactly what a cover crop can help prevent, Susan points out. “Even if it would have been three inches tall, that have would been three inches of roots underneath, and it wouldn’t have washed near that bad,” she says. “Look at that puddle. That’s not a puddle; that’s probably four inches deep.”

We make it back to the truck stop and say our goodbyes. I’ll head to Kansas City for the night, then to Wichita in the morning, then to planes that will carry me back to my adopted home of South Florida. I think about the bigger journeys we’re on as a nation, journeys both exciting and dangerous. The one we’re taking away from conventional agriculture and toward regenerative. Away from the “normal” world we’ve known and into the realities of a warmer planet. For now, though, I aim the car west, into the dazzling glare of a June sunset in farm country, the possibilities these fields contain stretching all around me.