There is a group of organic farmers in East Pierce County who are working together to preserve farming knowledge and looking toward the future. And they all happen to be women.
“It’s amazing the amount of stereotypes we’re breaking,” said Cheryl “The Pig Lady” Ouellette, owner of Piglets and more.
About eight women called the Women in Farming group meet about every month. They are part support group, part basin of knowledge and part innovators in preserving an industry.
The meetings are fairly informal, Ouellette said. They meet at each other’s farms. Together they can vent, brainstorm and come up with solutions to problems each of them face as farmers in today’s world.
The group started a few years ago when Ouellette and a few other women took an agricultural class through the Washington State University Extension Center. They were each on the road to starting their own farms, she said.
“We all started our farming operations around the same time,” Ouellette said.
The support they had for each other continued when they began farming.
First they would go to each other’s farms for “Weed and Wine” day. They would socialize with wine in tow and help each other out whether it was getting dirty or just figuring out a solution to a problem.
“Slowly it’s kind of just evolved,” Ouellette said.
Now the Women in Farming group meets once a month. Often there’s a potluck and seed catalogues spread across a table as these women look to the future of farming. There are about eight regulars, including Ouellette, Terry Carkner of Terry’s Berries and Carrie Little of Mother Earth Farms.
“It’s nice to have a community to share life situations with and lessons learned and where we go from here,” Little said. “Knowing you’re not alone out there doing this work is so great.”
Like any group there is a little bit of competition, but none want to run the other out of business, Ouellette said.
“There is a healthy competitiveness because we enjoy that,” Ouellette said. “But it’s not to the exclusion of anybody. There’s plenty of room for more farmers like us.”
Although historically women have had a major role in farming, the identity of women as farmers isn’t apparent in the United States, Carkner said.
“So many of the roles that occur in farming have always been in the woman’s realm,” Little said.
An example would be seed saving. Historically, women would save the seeds for next year’s harvest. Without that contribution many of today’s crops wouldn’t be around, Little said.
What’s unique and refreshing about the women farmers’ group is that they’re able to work together on a different level than men, Ouellete said. They work as a team.
They help each other solve problems rather than guarding farming secrets, Little added
“It just works,” Ouellette said. “We talk through the problems together and by the time we’re done we all feel better.”
It’s really about building community, Little said, and working together to make farming sustainable for all.
“We’re looking toward how we are going to keep it sustaining,” Ouellette said.
Networking with each other is important to sustain farming, Carkner said. More and more often farms, especially smaller ones, are struggling with finding suppliers or people who know how to work on farming equipment.
“Those guys are a dying breed and then they’re gone,” Carkner said, adding that when that knowledge fades away, it becomes a struggle to run a farm.
“Because that’s the sort of information you can’t get in the phone book,” she said. “You get that information from people.”
All three agreed that knowledge is one resource that is sometimes forgotten when it comes to discussions about preserving farms.
“That knowledge pool is so incredibly valuable,” Little said.
The group is as much of a knowledge resource as it is a time to recharge, Ouellette said.
“You need to take a couple of hours to do this,” she said. “I look forward to when the gals come here.
“We all have each other’s backs.”
It’s not always needed, but knowing the support is there is nice to have, Ouellette said.
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Women and Agriculture conference
The 2008 annual Women in Agriculture Conference takes place April 18-19 in East Wenatchee. The conference features a number of topics and workshops, such as transition farm ownership with a family, land and water rights, transitioning to organic production and writing a business place.
> For more information and how to register go to www.ncw.wsu.edu/family. Registation is due by April 15.
> More information can also be obtained by contacting the WSU Extension at 509-745-8531 or Margaret Viebrock at viewbrock@wsu.edu.
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