Celebrating 200 Years of Vermont Women Farmers

By Mary Elizabeth Fratini

Photo: Margaret Michniewicz

Mimi Arnstein of Wellspring Farm, Marshfield

Vermont’s agricultural history is reverently referenced with each political cycle, but many people are unaware of women’s integral role in its preservation. From the earliest pioneer days to the Depression to the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, women kept farms alive. Today, women are one of the fastest-growing demographics in farming across the nation.

Vermont’s Agricultural Heritage

The role of female farmers and the challenges they face have evolved with the industry. Vermont’s first settlement rush came in the 1790s, with 80 to 90 percent of migrants planning to take up farming, according to Michael Sherman’s best-selling history of the state, Freedom and Unity (2004). In those early years, wheat and potash were cash crops — Vermonters exported 30,000 bushels of wheat in 1792 — and just two to three years of hard labor were often enough to gain economic independence.

Farm size averaged 100 acres, but families often cultivated just one-fifth of that area at a time in the tradition of rotating lands to allow time for the soil to recover. Crops included grains like wheat, rye and barley raised for family consumption and sale; a variety of vegetables for the household, including peas, turnips and pumpkins; and corn and hay for their livestock of cattle, pigs, sheep and horses. Hemp and flax were cultivated to make the family’s clothing.

Vermont’s early farms were truly family affairs, and in 1798 Ira Allen said that “the labours of the family are divided and proportioned according to their strength, ingenuity, and sex.” In reality, that translated to men being responsible for the tilling, planting and harvesting of field crops; equipment repair; cutting firewood; and care of livestock during the winter. Women held the handles of food preservation and preparation; caring for vegetable, herb and medicinal gardens; feeding the livestock; and spinning, knitting and sewing the family’s clothes, as well as cloth to trade for items like salt and coffee not produced on the farm.

By the 1820s, the tradition of sustainable and self-sufficient family farms began to fall prey to economic opportunities and pressures. Wheat was initially a cash crop, but by 1834 the state was importing 60,000 barrels of flour annually as more farmers moved from wheat to corn in order to feed their growing herds of cattle and sheep. Nature and national politics drove the transition, with Congress enacting protective tariffs favoring wool production and textile interests on the heels of a wheat midge infestation. “The ‘sheep craze’ had begun,” writes Sherman, “and with it came a quickening of Vermont agriculture’s integration into the wider markets beyond the state and increased exposure to the vicissitudes of government regulation.” The increase in sheep brought an equal demand for grazing acreage that, in turn, raised land prices, making it far more difficult to parlay a new farm into economic independence.

Despite these changes, many farms remained largely unchanged through the first half of the 19th century. By 1850, the average farm size in Vermont was 139 acres. Before the century’s end, however, changes in labor and production would spur a great nostalgia for the life of a farmer in the previous generation, a sentiment that still finds echoes today. Sherman quotes a Middletown resident in 1877 who “deplore[d] the ‘great change, going on [that] severed our connection with the good old times’…Gone now [were] the times when he was considered the best manager who did ‘everything within himself.’” Specifically, this resident longed for the days when “‘the women picked their own wool, carded their own cloth, cut, made and mended their own garments, dipped their own candles, made their own soap, bottomed their own chairs, braided their own baskets, wove their own carpets, quilts and coverlids, picked their own geese, milked their own cows, fed their own calves and went visiting or to meeting on their own feet and all this with much less fuss and ado than our modern ladies make when they are simply obliged to oversee the work of an ordinary household in these days.’”

The combination of consistently increasing land prices and a static number of farms was at the root of the shift away from independent farms. “[M]en in large numbers abandoned hopes for land ownership, drifted to employment as small tradesmen, mechanics or factory workers…or abandoned the Green Mountains for the West,” Sherman writes. And while the railroad spelled doom for Vermont’s sheep industry, it also launched the dominance of dairying that continues to this day. Before the first refrigerator cars, milk was consumed locally, churned into heavily salted butter for export in the winter, or made into cheese at home. After 1850, however, dairy farmers expanded their herds and began monitoring breed purity to ensure more milk or higher butterfat for butter and cheese production as they participated in the larger regional market for dairy products. In just twenty years, the state added almost 40,000 milch cows.

The last three decades of the 19th century proved to be a period of stability, with Vermont reaching an all-time high in 1880 of 35,522 farms working 4.8 million acres, or 82 percent of the state’s land. Vermont’s agriculture began its long decline from that point, with half the number of farms in 1950 as in 1890. Currently, there are fewer than 1.5 million acres in production, one-third of which are forests.

Women Farming in the 21st Century

Farming statistics are bleak from a long historical perspective, but one of the few bright spots in the last decade is the growing number of women involved in agriculture. According to the latest survey by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the number of women agricultural operators rose from only 9 percent of all operators in 1997 to 27 percent in 2002. While the number of male principal farm operators in the nation declined by more than 200,000 over that period, the number of women rose by more than 28,000, and their farms increased by almost 10 million acres. At this rate, some have pointed out, in ten years women could own 75 percent of American farmland.

In Vermont, the trend has some variations. The state actually saw a decrease in the number of women principal operators, as well as total acres under production, between 1997 and 2002. But women operators in 2002 represented a higher percentage of all operators in Vermont: 33 percent.

According to Mary Peabody, director of the Women’s Agricultural Network (WAgN), Vermont women are joining agriculture by two main routes: young women graduating from college with agricultural degrees are choosing farming as a career opportunity; and professional women are entering farming in mid-life. Each group faces a unique set of challenges. “Young women have a strong production skill base to draw on, but they frequently don’t have the financial resources to start a business,” Peabody says. “In contrast, other women have already been in the workforce for a number of years and have some money to invest in the start-up of a business, but they may lack the production skills.” A third group of women become involved in concert with spouses who are already farmers, both through marriage and death, as more widows are assuming responsibility for entire farms.

Dairy Queens

Although dairying remains the largest agricultural industry with 1,500 farms, it is also the most cost and labor intensive, and the least likely to be headed by a woman. Lyle Haven Farm in East Montpelier is an exception: owned by Boston lawyer Jerry Rappaport, it is managed by Sue Brown, who has overseen the 800-acre, 70-cow farm and its seven employees for the last decade. The 43-year-old Brown did not grow up on a farm, but she studied dairy science in college and has worked on farms her entire life. “Anybody in farming has to truly love what they do. I don’t think that is different from any other job,” Brown says. “I really enjoy working with breeding. It’s all about bloodlines, bulls and picking matings, as well as showing and exhibiting.”

Despite her somewhat unique position, Brown says her gender has not been an issue. “Men who don’t know I’m the manager will come on the farm thinking they are going to find someone else in charge, but once they realize it’s me — well, everyone has respect if you can do your job,” she says. “I know what I am doing and I think they understand that, so they don’t give me any crap. I don’t know any other [female] managers, but I know that wives are as big a part of dairy farms as you’ll find. They’ll do all the books, feed the calves. They are involved, just not technically managers,” Brown says.

A little less than half of Lyle Haven Farm’s total acreage is actively farmed right now, for grazing and raising corn and hay for feed. The farm sells 160,000 to 170,000 pounds of milk to Booth Brothers every month, with each cow producing an average of 80 pounds per day. Brown receives a premium from Booth Brothers to not use rBst, but she sees the hormone as another tool for farmers already stretched to the breaking point. “People want good milk that isn’t tainted with that, but big dairies are so focused on production that all they worry about is how to get more milk out of their cows at one time. But that was just a big flap over nothing in my opinion,” she says. “Our cows don’t need it and the bottom line is, if you take really good care of your cows, they will milk.”

At their farm in East Cabot, Jackie Fulsom and her husband Roy also forego rBst, although they have used it in the past. The dairy farm stretches over 100 acres which they own and an additional 150 acres that they rent for hay and silage; corn is bought annually because they don’t have enough land to grow it themselves. “We used rBst for economic reasons because it allowed us to make a little more milk and therefore income. It was a good investment for us to handle the same amount of animals without growing our equipment or land base,” Fulsom says. They stopped using the hormone a few years ago, however, when Monsanto created a quota system for purchases that wasn’t feasible for the 60-cow farm. “We hired somebody and worked on making more milk with better feed and paying attention that way, and it’s been okay because the price of milk has been steady for the last few years,” she says.

Since starting their farm twenty years ago, the Fulsoms have sold all their milk to the Cabot Creamery Cooperative, which was founded in 1919 and merged with the regional cooperative Agrimark several years ago. They remain a small family farm, with Roy largely responsible for production and Jackie handling the bookkeeping as well as providing insurance. She is also president of the Vermont Farm Bureau (VFB), a non-profit agricultural advocacy organization. “Fortunately, we both believe there is value in spending time talking about agriculture, whether it is as a volunteer or part of the job.”

Like the Fulsom farm, the Strafford Creamery, formerly the Rock Bottom Creamery in Strafford, is run by husband and wife team Earl Ransom and Amy Hueyfer, but as an independent glass-bottling organic dairy, the farm represents a departure from the status quo in dairying of the last several decades.

Rock Bottom originally sold milk to The Organic Cow when it was based in Chelsea, but the relationship soured after the company sold to Horizon in 2000. “It was the first time a national corporation was involved and within a few months the milk was being pooled across several states and ultra-pasteurized, and they used QIA [Quality Institute of America] certification, which was not stringent at all at the time,” Hueyfer says. “Then they started threatening farms with not renewing contracts unless the price of milk came down, which is a regular business tactic, but not at all about farming and not why you work this hard.”

So Hueyfer and her husband contacted a newspaper ad for setting up a mini-dairy and created Strafford Creamery. Their signature glass bottling was both an idealistic and a philosophical choice. “We wanted to stay local and have sustainable packaging, and we figured that if we were starting on our own there would be no compromises,” Hueyfer says. “Besides, every dairy farmer dreams of seeing their cows’ milk in a glass bottle. They don’t think, oh, if only that plastic jug had my sticker on it!”

The farm has 38 cows and ships milk and ice cream to twenty-eight locations between Brattleboro and Burlington, producing about twice as much milk as ice cream. Balancing supply and demand for their products is difficult and essential. “It’s the biggest thing we do, but it’s a scary game for us,” Hueyfer says. “Right now, for example, we have some extra milk and its tempting to take on more stores, but I know this is a slow period and when school starts we won’t be able to make enough, so we are just waiting it out, making more ice cream.” Hueyfer calls herself the CEO, but mostly in jest. “The cows outnumber us by ten to one, so what it means is that I am the relief milker, the person that gets parts when something breaks, the hand that is otherwise unassigned to a task, and managing the day-to-day accounts,” she says.

Strafford Creamery is not likely to expand into other dairy products in the near future. “We had an at-home kit long before the creamery and couldn’t even make ricotta — who can’t make ricotta? — and we lost patience,” Hueyfer says. “We tried butter for a little while, but you need to charge $20 per pound because it is on such a small scale. I understand that people do it, but you have to be beyond a Zen Buddhist. Maybe the Dalai Lama has enough patience to make it with our equipment, but it can take all day to make fifty pounds of butter, so as a mental health issue, we no longer do it.”

Beyond Dairy

Although dairying represents 25 percent of all farms, that leaves more than 5,000 Vermont farms producing and selling other products. According to the Lamoille County Economic Development Council (LEDC), these small, specialized farms are increasingly being run by women. “The increased start-up costs associated with livestock means that more women start with small fruits and vegetables,” Peabody of WAgN explains. In addition, women associated with WAgN often participate in value-added production, from processing raw fiber into yarn and garments, to making soaps, cheeses or other specialty products from what they raise.

These value-added products often translate into more economic stability by supplementing income during the traditionally thin winters. Master gardeners and sisters Lynette Courtney and Carol Schminke of Greensboro Bend added vermiposting — creating compost by raising worms — to their existing nursery and landscaping business. “We call it value-added compost and use the castings in all our nursery plants as well as selling them separately,” Courtney explains. Although the addition made for an unwieldy business name — New Leaf Designs Gardening Services and Eclectic Nursery/Down to Earth Worm Farm of Vermont — it has proved a successful marketing, educational, and tourism hook. The sisters participate in the Shelburne Flower Show each February, selling out of castings and landing on Channel 3 last year as “the wacky worm sisters,” a nom de plume they subsequently adopted for events and presentations. The worms supplement the sisters’ gardens and nurseries at Courtney’s house, which also includes her husband’s fine-furniture and jewelry business upstairs, making the whole space a diverse tourist and educational event. “We are listed as an attraction in the brochures and anyone who comes to visit will find something that they are interested in,” Courtney says. “It is more about marketing than it is about farming, sometimes.”

At bottom, marketing is about connecting farmers with consumers. When that role is handled by third parties, it can mean a sharp cut in profits for agriculturalists. Bambi Freeman of Sterling Brook Farm in Stowe has been raising sheep for more than thirty years and has spent almost half of that time as an independent farmer after the first Green Mountain Shepherd Co-op voted to hire an outside contractor for marketing and bookkeeping. "You can't make money in farming if you are dependent on a middleman," Freeman says. "Anyone going into agriculture today needs education beyond high school, to be socially aware, and to learn those marketing and people skills that are so invaluable."

Freeman has sold a variety of sheep-related products at local farmers' markets and through special orders, but the beginning was tough. As she tells it, American soldiers in World War II often found canned mutton in their rations, "and if you've ever seen mutton in a can, with a layer of tallowy fat on top, and these guys couldn't build a fire and had to eat it cold – well, we lost an entire generation of lamb eaters and their children because when they came back they wouldn't touch it," she explains. "I had to reeducate everybody about how good lamb is by cooking burgers, shish kebobs, and sausage at the markets."

Today, the 66-year-old Freeman has made some changes to accommodate her age and health. "I still drag everything to the farmers' markets that I did when I was just starting out – sheepskins, blankets, duvet covers, mattress pads, yarns, hats – and the meat, except now they can cook it all themselves," she said. "I think about it all differently, though. I'm essentially running a store that is open three days a week in these locations and my customers know where to find me." Freeman has also stopped wintering sheep, but she began raising chickens about five years ago to make up the lost income. She now averages 400 birds and 120 lambs each summer. "I wanted to be a little more diversified because that's the way to make money: give your customers another product. And they are a wonderful complement to my farm," she says.

The Politics of Loving Our Farms

Negotiations between farmers, neighbors, regulators and politicians are ongoing and often independent of the party in power. The most recent issues to cause waves include water quality regulations, use of genetically modified seeds (GMOs), and supporting a local agricultural infrastructure as opposed to moving towards fewer, and larger, consolidated farms.

Despite disagreements, agricultural advocates came together last session to help pass a bill with revised water quality regulations and funding to help farmers meet the new requirements. Legislators also asked small profitable farms for feedback on successful strategies and will revisit how to best support a local food system when the session convenes in January. Senator Sara Kittel (D-Franklin), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee since 1996, comments that Vermont is “the second most rural state and we need to focus on being proactive about developing farming jobs and farming-related industries to keep the land working. A lot of indicators say this is the time to strengthen the system locally. The question is, how can we best develop that in Vermont?” One area to be studied is access to consumers, including how to add to CSAs [is this Community Supported Agriculture farms?], farmers’ markets, and the Fresh Network, possibly through expanding school and government purchases.

There is also an initiative to increase the involvement of young people in agriculture. “We are trying to resurrect and integrate all the various programs for youth in agriculture, to figure out how to have more of a presence in our middle schools and integrate the awareness of nutrition and local foods state-wide,” Kittle says. The Vermont Youth Conservation Corp (VYCC), for example, had a farming component that lapsed due to loss of federal funds. There is also some discussion about how UVM, as a land grant college, can help support the next generation of agriculture. Advocates of all persuasions agree that Vermonters are not doing enough to bring younger people into the industry politically or personally.

A still-neglected area of study is Vermont’s women farmers, says Peabody. “They have to face a society that still largely identifies farmers as male. We need to support research on women farmers to see where the differences lie and how they impact quality of life and profitability, as well as how to develop appropriately-sized equipment and protective gear so women can remain safe while farming.”

Financing is also a huge barrier for both experienced and new farmers. “Cultivating the next generation of farmers is a real challenge and we haven’t figured out how to transition farms between generations very well yet,” Jackie Fulsom says. “There are farms that sell conservation and development rights to let the next generation buy out the farm but what happens when that younger generation wants to move on? There needs to be another way to finance that future and there are not many banks left that understand or deal with the special needs of agricultural lending.”

It is not only the banks that lack familiarity with agriculture, according to Amy Shollenberger, policy director of Rural Vermont, a farmers’ organization. “There is a culture shift that needs to happen because right now farmers are looked at as a problem to solve,” she says. “Instead we should look at farmers and agriculture as an incredible blessing and a major economical asset and ask, how can we integrate this great benefit that many other states don’t have?”

For Amy Hueyfer, that culture shift begins with a simple act. “The biggest thing people need to do is buy local. It drives me crazy when people say, oh I love my local co-op and do all my shopping there, except for monthly stop at BJ’s to stock up on basics!” she says. “I know there is an economic balance for everybody, but certainly put your money where your mouth is, go to the local hardware store because we need it and the infrastructure it supports by spending money close to home.”

In spite of uncooperative weather, unpredictable politics, long hours, and seasonal economic viability, all of these women remain committed to their farms, their animals, and Vermont’s agricultural heritage. “On a day-to-day basis, the farm is like a marriage and I am totally committed to these animals,” Brown says. “When it is forty below, there are still five people working out there. These cows want for nothing.” In celebration of that spirit, the VFB began the Vermont Agricultural Hall of Fame a few years ago. “We never take the time to celebrate what we have done well because you get into crisis mode. We need to celebrate and remember people who have done terrific things in agriculture in this state,” Fulsom says. There are now seventeen inductees, with four more to be added this year.

But the rewards for women in agriculture are even simpler, says Hueyfer. “Especially as a woman in the world, you can’t have this much fun. The things you would have to do otherwise to get a ride on a tractor…! But to hay acres and acres of grass falling down behind you, the round bales stacking up in the field — it’s just cool. 

Mary Fratini is a freelance photojournalist living in Montpelier, though she’d like to be a farmer someday. She can be reached at: 229-6178 or maryfrat@vermontwoman.com