JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Over the past several years, several prominent news sources have claimed the proportion of women involved in active farming has soared dramatically over the past decade.

Not really, say many farm economists and rural sociologists. It is true more farms today are owned by women than in 1997, but a major factor in addition is that the USDA is finally documenting many of the women who were involved in agriculture all along.

The number of female participants in direct agricultural activity was vastly underestimated by official sources until recently, according to Dr. Mary Hendrickson, associate professor with the University of Missouri extension. Until 2002, the USDA required each farm registered on the Census of Agriculture be listed as having one “principal operator.” Many farms operated by couples, or by multigenerational partnerships, were not able to be listed as such.

In the case of couple-operated farms, the majority of them chose to list the husband as primary operator, thus creating an undercount of wives who may have been just as involved in agricultural efforts. Since 2002, however, farms have been allowed to list up to three operators each.

“Once you could identify more than one operator per farm, more women (were counted),” Hendrickson said. She did point out, though, “if you look at the number of all women operators, there (was) a 19 percent increase (from 2002 to 2007).”

Noting the high number of women aged 60 or older who appeared on the list of farm operators during those five years, she explained many of them were widows who became primary farm operators upon the death of their husbands.

Major geographical differences are noted in the gender demographics, as well as differences according to the branches of agriculture. Small ruminant (sheep and goat) farms tend to have a near-equal ratio of male and female “principal operators” in many parts of the country, while hog and beef operations are much more likely to have men than women as their principal operators.

Dairy farming’s profile falls somewhere in between. Fruit, nut and vegetable operations “tend to be about equally matched” between the sexes, Hendrickson said. Grain and oilseed crops tend to be a heavily male type of operation in most parts of the country, meaning a high percentage (in some cases, exceeding 90 percent) of participants in these operations are men.

Researchers have also found diversified “general farms” tend to have a higher rate of female involvement in actual field operations, when compared to more specialized farms in the same counties.

As to why these things are true, there are likely a number of interacting factors. Rural sociologists differ in opinion about the “chicken and egg question” of which came first – geographical or occupational differences – in how farm families view gender, among other things.

Jane Adams, professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University, is one of several academics who have extensively studied gender roles in the rural United States and, specifically, the role of women in American agriculture. She found the “community” formed by each commodity in a region tended to develop its own gender norms, which became part of the lifestyle of families who produced that commodity.

Fred Whitford, an agricultural historian as well as the director of Purdue University’s pesticide program, has also studied the matter. He wrote a book about one particular woman in agriculture, Virginia Meredith, the founder of home economics education in Indiana. As a widow she kept the family’s Shorthorn cattle farm going for decades during the late 19th century, at a time when few Midwest women were actual owners of farms.

“She was one of only a few dozen women in the country who actually owned her own livestock farm,” Whitford said. “Then she (introduced) home economics as a science for women to study.”

In the past few years there has been a surge of academic and lay interest in Meredith’s work, partly because of the centennial of Cooperative Extension programs, which she helped to found and establish. But Whitford is convinced the interest is also for other reasons.

“There is a lack of recognition of the contribution of women in agriculture (historically),” he observed. “(Now) there is a desire to learn about women and their role in agriculture, (and) that women were important in the very beginning.”

So was Virginia Meredith that unique? Yes, Whitford said, because it was unusual for women to do the kinds of things her career involved. But in the behind-the-scenes workings of the farm, they were managing a heavy domestic workload. In the 1870s, USDA Commissioner Jonathan Periam reported in his region of Illinois and Indiana, the wife was the most overworked member of the farm family “on three farms out of four.”

Whitford believes this is still pretty accurate, even if the specific tasks and responsibilities have changed. He points out on many farms in Indiana and elsewhere, wives end up shouldering a large portion of the responsibility for bookkeeping, household work, input buying, child care and other needs, often in addition to holding a job off-farm. All this, while the husbands do primarily fieldwork.

Even such patterns, though, are less pronounced in some communities than others. Communities made up of families all producing a single major commodity tend to have long-established traditions on how those families are to work, and these can explain many of the regional differences.

Swine-raising districts, for instance, tend to have a highly gendered division of labor in which women from neighboring farms collaborate with one another to get work projects done, and men in the community do likewise, but seldom men and women together, even within a farm operation.

In the Farm World region, Michigan has the highest proportion of female farm operators, approaching 30 percent. Michigan has far more women listed as active farm operators than Illinois and Indiana, per capita; in fact, Illinois is neck-and-neck with Kansas as having the least.

Ohio and Kentucky have slightly more women as primary farm operators than Illinois and Indiana, but not nearly as many as Michigan. Even in farm photo collections from the 1920s in Michigan, one will often see couples working together in the field or on tractors; photo collections taken in Illinois and Indiana during the same era typically show only men in such scenes.

So, at the end of the day, are there really more women in agriculture than before? In a lot of ways, yes, Whitford said.

“On the professional side, a lot more than before. You see that even at Purdue; we now have a number of top-notch research women in the School of Ag.” Women were always important in farm families, he said, “but their role was often not so much production” as in other things.

”There’s no doubt in my mind that women are the decision-makers of much of the farms. Their influence cannot be overstated.”