Relational Agriculture: Gender, Sexuality, and Sustainability in U.S. Farming

Abstract

Although 97% of U.S. farms are “family-owned,” little research examines how gender and sexual relationships – inherent in familial dynamics – influence farmers’ practices and livelihoods. Gender and sexual dynamics – shaped by race and class – affect who is considered a farmer, land management decisions, and access to resources like land, subsidies, and knowledge. We use feminist and queer lenses to illuminate how today’s agricultural gender and sexual relations are not “natural,” but when left uninterrogated are constructed in ways that harm women and queer farmers while limiting potential to develop sustainable practices. Women and queer farmers also resist, “re-orienting” gender and sexual relations in ways that expand possibilities for achieving food justice and ecological sustainability. We offer “relational agriculture” as a tool for making visible and re-orienting gender and sexual relations on farms. Relational agriculture brings sexuality into food justice and demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality to agricultural sustainability.

Keywords:

• Agricultural history
• food justice
• gender
• LGBTQ+
• queer
• relational agriculture
• sexuality
• small-scale farming
• sustainable food systems

Introduction

Food production in the U.S. is organized through family life; 97% of US farms are “family owned” (USDA 2015), although often rented out to other families and reliant on hired labor. Rarely can single people make a farm enterprise economically viable on their own. Farm operators often rely on a business partner who is typically also an intimate partner to directly contribute to the farm business or indirectly contribute off-farm income and healthcare. Although farm workers are often single, many times their intimate partners are also directly or indirectly involved in the farm operation. These gendered and sexualized relationships in farm life are so ubiquitous that they have long gone unquestioned and their effects on the social organization of agriculture little noticed.

The replication of these traditional gender and sexual relations in industrial and alternative agriculture is what rural queer theorists call the reproduction of the heteronormativity of the family farm (Keller 2015; Leslie 2017b). A queer lens on agriculture asks how heteronormativity impacts gender dynamics and sexual minorities in agriculture. It also exposes how sexuality organizes food production for all those who farm because everybody – regardless of their gender or sexuality – enacts and is affected by gender and sexual relations. A queer lens is a relational agriculture lens that invites us to appreciate the full social relational diversity of agriculture and how agriculture’s inherent social relationality impacts sustainability. Here we develop the ecofeminist vision of a relational understanding of agriculture described in Carter, Chennault, and Kruzic (2018), with an emphasis on agriculture as a human social activity embedded not just in gender relations but also sexual relations. Embracing agriculture as inherently relational means paying more attention to gendered and sexualized relationships on farms. It also means actively including the perspectives and experiences of women and queer farm operators, workers, and intimate associates about those relations, while not neglecting the perspectives and experiences of dominant groups. Acknowledging the relationality of agriculture further means recognizing the frequent inequalities of gender and sexuality in food and farming, and thus calling upon us to remedy these injustices.

This special issue looks at relational agriculture on U.S. farms today. We seek to create a moment in the literature that crystalizes our growing knowledge about the importance of gender and sexuality in food and agriculture. We emphasize that gender and sexuality are not a sideshow but should be understood as central to the organization of food and agriculture with implications for sustainability. We begin with a brief history of how the U.S. state oriented the family farm by promoting a particular set of gender and sexual relations conducive to industrial agriculture. We then review how women farmers are re-orienting gender relations and the implications this has for developing sustainable practices. Along the way, we explain how race and class lenses are critical for understanding gender and sexual agricultural relations, and highlight key lessons from food justice scholarship that guide our approach to “queering” this literature. We bring sexuality into food justice by discussing the emerging literature on how queer farmers are re-orienting sexual relations on farms and how this helps to make visible the role of sexuality in organizing food production on all farms. We argue that achieving a socially just and ecologically sustainable agriculture demands understanding and re-orienting heteropatriarchal relations on farms. We offer relational agriculture – rooted in feminist and queer agrarian praxis – as a tool for doing so.

Orienting the Family Farm

The U.S. model of farming within and among a nuclear family unit emerged as a recent social construction. Just over a century ago, the family farm did not exist in the way we think of it now:

Early twentieth-century Americans rarely, if ever, used the term, but such farms loosely resembled the contemporary ideal of “family farms,” though the families in question—sprawling, contingent, and multigenerational—bore little resemblance to a nucleated “farmer and farmer’s wife” model that featured rigid divisions of gendered labor (Rosenberg 2015, 4–5).

Organizing farm life around a nuclear family with a male head of household in charge of food production was never a “natural” phenomenon, but a social creation. Indeed, matrilineality was common in agrarian societies, as were extended family forms of kinship (Bell 2018; Holt-Giménez 2017). Both remain prevalent in varying degrees and forms in some areas today, especially India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Although several scholars have used feminist perspectives to disrupt patriarchal assumptions about the family farm’s history, division of labor, and power relations (e.g. Sachs 1983; Whatmore 1991), we center recent work by historian Gabriel Rosenberg who specifically uses a queer theory lens to unearth how today’s family farm is actually a recent social construct.

Starting in the 1930s, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) pushed a nuclear patriarchal model as part of its effort to address concerns with the declining rural birth rate (Rosenberg 2016). One way the USDA did this was through its new 4-H program, which it used to educate rural youth in heterosexual romance to increase rural reproduction.¹ 4-H has since educated 70 million people (Rosenberg 2015, 2). By the 1940s, 4-H clubs featured sexual education classrooms and “4-H organizers focused on how they could train rural youth for healthy, wholesome marriages,” creating clubs “conducive to heterosexual romance” (Rosenberg 2016, 96–97). 4-H camp taught children how to engage in heterosexual courtship (Rosenberg 2016, 98). 4-H produced materials that “asserted that the economic and biological union between a revenue-producing male ‘farmer’ and a nurturing ‘farmer’s wife’ constituted both the ideal and normal form of organization for rural life” (Rosenberg 2016, 89). As such, rural heterosexuality was not a given, but “required the state’s assistance” (Rosenberg 2016, 103–104). The state’s efforts to teach heteronormative relations through 4-H continues today, exemplified by the Trump administration’s demands that the national 4-H organization withdraws a recent policy that explicitly welcomed LGBTQ+ members for the first time, pressuring local 4-H organizations to revoke guidance documents for LGBTQ+ inclusion (Crowder and Clayworth 2018).

The USDA also used 4-H to shift rural gender norms so as to align with industrial agriculture. The USDA interpreted how men farmers enacted masculinity as contrary to the adoption of corporatist agriculture and wished to make the rural U.S. more hospitable to agricultural industry and mechanization. From the state’s perspective, farmers “begged like dependents for public relief” because they “lack[ed] the masculine self-discipline to run their farms like businesses” (Rosenberg 2015, 16–17). By the early 20th century, the word “dependents” in the U.S. had been redefined as not only an economic relation but as a pejorative word with sexist and racist connotations (Fraser and Gordon 1994); the specter of state support threatened to emasculate and challenge the racial privilege of white male farmers. In this context, 4-H programming began training boys to be farmer-businessmen. For instance, 4-H loan programs gave boys money to practice purchasing and raising an animal and to track their finances to repay the loan. 4-H aimed to teach boys “efficiency, discipline, and precise financial record keeping, all characteristics deemed essential to propertied manhood” (Rosenberg 2015, 56). Similar to 4-H’s push to cultivate farmer-businessmen, tractor advertisements have evolved from emphasizing farmer-as-mechanic to farmer-as-businessman (Brandth 1995).

The notion that U.S. farmers are male is also a social construction pushed by programs like 4-H. This construction stands in stark contrast to women’s long legacy of farming, comprising 43% of the worldwide agricultural labor force – with some estimates being much higher because women’s labor often goes uncounted (SOFA Team and Doss 2011). Whereas 4-H pitched financial literacy and field work to boys, it encouraged girls to veer away from farm work typically performed by their mothers and grandmothers. As the U.S. industrialized, a new ideal of white male independence was born, based on a single wage that supported a wife and children (Fraser and Gordon 1994). This new household division of labor required “female economic dependence,” which gave rise to the “newly invented figure” of the “housewife” (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 318). In this context, 4-H taught girls that instead of farming, they should focus on “cultivating beauty, health, and careful consumption in rural homes” (Rosenberg 2015, 17). In 4-H home economics classes, girls learned that their futures depended on their ability to maintain their appearance to attract a husband, to perform domestic labor, and to care for children (Rosenberg 2016, 99–100). These rural reforms encouraged a new vision of the “farmers wife” similar to middle-class urban housewives. This involved teaching girls to “abandon revenue-producing labor and focus on domestic consumption, nurturing, health, and aesthetics” (Rosenberg 2015, 63).

In sum, a queer lens on 4-H (Rosenberg 2015) is one example of how the state contributed to orienting the social relationships of the farm. That is, it actively promoted a particular vision of gender and sexuality in agriculture: a particular vision of agriculture’s relations. It trained women to eschew agricultural work and to see themselves as consumers and caretakers. The state was just one actor in this process, but it exemplifies how the family farm was not “natural,” but constructed. The nation’s model way of producing food was now structured around a combined business and heterosexual relationship featuring a gendered division of labor. This history of the social construction of gender and sexual relations on U.S. farms provides context for the barriers women and queer farmers face but also reminds us of the possibilities for how they may re-orient the family farm.

Women Farmers: Re-Orienting Gender Relations on Farms

The socialization of gendered farm roles is so strong that even today when women live on farms, do farm work, and make decisions about the farm, they often still see themselves as the farmer’s wife, not as a farmer themselves (Bell et al. 2004; Brasier et al. 2014). Women who claim the farmer title struggle to be interpreted as farmers in their local and agricultural communities (Keller 2014). In addition, the label is infused with masculine connotations to the extent that women who call themselves farmers report higher self-perceptions of masculinity than women on farms who see themselves primarily as homemakers (Smyth, Swendener, and Kazyak 2018). Strikingly, the U.S. Census of Agriculture did not include gender on their survey until 1978, when it found that 5% of farms were operated by women (Hoppe and Korb 2013, iv). By 2007, women farmers constituted 14% of primary operators, and 30% of primary and secondary operators (Hoppe and Korb 2013, iv). These numbers, however, likely underrepresent the actual number of women farmers, as they do not account for the multiple roles women play on farms (Brasier et al. 2014). For instance, when the USDA collects data on farm production, farmers might not submit data about labor usually done by women – raising poultry, livestock chores, self-provisioning, and household labor – if they do not consider it farm work (Fink 1988). While the USDA statistics may still underrepresent the actual number of women farming, the apparent increase in women farming may be due to a combination of better reporting, women increasingly claiming the title of farmer, and more women actually farming (Sachs et al. 2016).

Farmers’ biggest economic challenge is land access (Ackoff, Bahrenburg, and Schute 2017), which continues to be heavily shaped by unequal gender relations. Historically, married white women gained the right to own land as states passed Married Women’s Property Acts from the 1830s through the 1870s (Alsgaard 2012). However, these laws did little to change women’s actual experiences; the laws’ true intent was to keep a wife’s land free from creditors when her farming husband went into debt and therefore maintain his middle-class lifestyle (Alsgaard 2012). Twentieth century legal changes such as women’s suffrage and the 1969 gender-neutral Uniform Probate Code have not eliminated gender inequities in access and inheritance. Women are still less likely to have sufficient capital to purchase land and they are not groomed for farmland inheritance in the same way as men (Alsgaard 2012). Today, Pilgeram and Amos (2015) find that women farm operators typically access land through one of three routes. First, they marry into land; that is, they gain access to their husband’s (often family) land. Second, they draw on their husband’s income from a non-farming career to purchase their own land. Finally, they acquire their own land later in life after saving enough money or through a divorce settlement. Those who do not have a partner, family, or other source of capital are at a disadvantage. Women own 46% of the nation’s rented farmland (Farmland Information Center 2018, 2) and Carter (2017) estimates that women own or co-own about half of all farmland. However, social expectations of women landowners often pressure them to maintain conventional land use practices and to defer decision making to men (Carter 2017). USDA statistics indicate that women non-operator landlords are less likely than men non-operator landlords to make management decisions about participating in government programs, conservation, crop insurance, and cultivation practices (Bigelow, Borchers, and Hubbs 2016, 39).

Many farmers rely on U.S. agricultural subsidies to manage the economic challenges of farming, but women are less likely than men to benefit from them. The Farm Bill subsidizes commodity crops, large farms, and industrial agriculture more heavily than fruits and vegetables, small farms, and organic agriculture (Ayazi and Elsheikh 2015; Johnson and Monke 2016). Women are more likely to engage in less subsidized forms of agriculture: smaller farms and fruit and vegetable production (Hall and Mogyorody 2007). These patterns may be due to the fact that commodity crops typically require more mechanization, land, and capital. Men have long excluded women from spaces where farmers learn mechanical skills and machine operation, contributing to the coding of tractors and machinery as masculine realms (Brandth 1995). In addition, women have long experienced discrimination in land access and capital acquisition, especially through inheritance (Alsgaard 2012; Carter 2017; Pilgeram and Amos 2015), contributing to women-operated farms’ smaller on average size than those operated by men (Hoppe and Korb 2013, iv). These dynamics are exacerbated for women of color (Leslie and White 2018). Taken together, women farmers receive fewer subsidies to support their farms.

When women farmers seek loans to expand their operation, they may encounter gender-based discrimination. In 2001, women farmers filed a lawsuit against the USDA, alleging discrimination by the Farm Service Agency (FSA) in the agricultural loan process (Love v. Johannes, later Love v. Vilsack) (Women Farmers Litigation 2017b). The plaintiffs argued that they had been denied “equal and fair access to farm loans and loan servicing, and of consideration of their administrative complaints” because of their gender (United States District Court for the District of Columbia 2016). As Keller (2014, 76) argues, loan officers “did not ‘read’ women and racial minorities as farmers.” Allegations included unfairly denying loans, giving smaller loans than needed, or giving them late (Alsgaard 2012, 391). Over a similar timeline to Love v. Vilsack, Hispanic farmers in Garcia v. Vilsack also alleged discrimination by the USDA (Feder and Cowan 2013). Although both cases failed to win class certification, the 2008 Farm Bill ordered the resolution of all claims against the USDA by socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, allocating $1.33 billion for women and Hispanic farmers (Feder and Cowan 2013; USDA 2016), rolled out as the “Hispanic and Women Farmers and Ranchers Claims Resolution Process” in 2012 (Women Farmers Litigation 2017a). However, only 3,200 of the 54,000 submitted claims were approved, totaling $207 million in awards (USDA 2016, 5), likely leaving many who were harmed without compensation.

How women farmers experience this male-dominant field is the subject of Shisler and Sbicca’s (2019) paper in this issue. The authors argue that women farmers encountered tokenism and performed gender by assuming responsibility for feminized “carework,” like agricultural education, customer support, and feeding others. Women farmers simultaneously subverted patriarchy by claiming the farmer title as women but risked reproducing patriarchy by performing gender normative tasks in that role. The authors argue, “Carework has the potential to expand agricultural space for women, but also risks reproducing traditional gender ideas, which can subjugate women into subservient roles” (Shisler and Sbicca 2019). Thus, re-orienting gender relations on farms involves a careful balance between revaluing work and perspectives that have been historically socially constructed as feminine, while simultaneously creating space for redefining gender roles and the division of labor.

Re-Orienting Gender Relations for Developing Sustainable Practices

Just as the USDA recognized how masculinity presented hurdles for men adopting new farming ideologies in the 20th century (Rosenberg 2015), notions of manliness created barriers when contemporary farmers shifted to sustainable methods (Ferrell 2012; Peter et al. 2000). Throughout the 20th century, the USDA trained young rural and farm boys to enact a type of hegemonic masculinity that aligned with the notion of farmer-as-businessman (Rosenberg 2015), but did not fit with traits needed to cooperatively manage diversified, sustainable farming operations. Peter et al. (2000) find that whereas industrial agriculture aligns with aspects of hegemonic masculinity – such as bigness, mechanization, and domination of nature – transitioning to sustainable agriculture not only entails that men farmers change their farming practices, but also entails changing how they see themselves as men. They found that male sustainable farmers were more likely to admit mistakes to learn from them; describe farming as working with instead of against nature; praise cooperation instead of acting in competition with other farmers; and welcome the voices of women. Ferrell (2012) similarly finds that transitioning from burley tobacco to a diversified crop plan is a gendered transition; male farmers needed to reevaluate aspects of their own masculinity to do so. The reality that hegemonic masculinity is an obstacle to implementing sustainable agriculture suggests that feminist and anti-patriarchal training can be a relevant component of sustainable agriculture programming.

The rise of sustainable agriculture may provide inroads for women farmers, but gender-based barriers persist. Women account for a greater portion of sustainable and organic farm operators than industrial farm operators (Sachs et al. 2016; Trauger 2007). This pattern may exist because sustainable agriculture generally uses smaller plots, less machinery, and therefore less initial capital investment than industrial agriculture, making sustainable agriculture more accessible to women who have been discriminated against in accessing land, machinery, and capital (Pilgeram and Amos 2015). In comparison to men, women within sustainable agriculture sometimes hold different values – namely quality family life and spirituality (Chiappe and Flora 1998) – and definitions of quality of life derived from their gender-based roles and responsibilities in the home, community, and on the farm (Meares 1997). The sustainable agriculture movement was slow to recognize women’s unique contributions, leading one scholar in the 1990s to argue that, “the movement’s goals, visions, and activities are gender-specific, dominated by men’s participation and contributions” (Meares 1997). Recent scholarship on women sustainable farmers suggests that gendered divisions in sustainable agriculture persist, but as Sachs et al.’s (2016: 2) Feminist Agrifood Systems Theory (FAST) suggests, women are also changing these relations by prioritizing their social, economic, and environmental values; claiming the identity of farmer; creatively finding ways to access land, labor, and capital; renegotiating their agricultural roles; and networking with other women farmers.

Women farmer networks are a central way women farmers resist patriarchal relations in agriculture. Women landowners who make significant changes on the land – such as transitioning to sustainable agriculture – challenge social expectations and often rely on alternative farming networks like women farming groups to make those changes (Carter 2017). Through these networks, women landowners in Iowa gained mentorship, support, and information sources, contributing to their ability to act as “changemakers” who advocated for sustainable practices and conservation in their communities (Carter 2017). In Sachs et al.’s (2016) FAST framework, women farmer networks demonstrate women’s ways of knowing and working in agriculture, emphasizing collaboration and peer-to-peer education. For example, while 30% and 35% of Wisconsin women farmers utilized Farm Service Agency and extension services, respectively, 83% called upon other farmers when making decisions (Lezberg, Newenhouse, and Hamann 2009). Women farmers across Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana felt excluded from men-dominated farmer groups in the 1980s but gained important resources through their connections to other women farmers (Sachs 1983). Wisconsin women farmers also used local and regional networks to share new and useful sustainable practices (Hassanein 1999). Black women farmers in Detroit organized to revitalize vacant land into community farms, leading a movement to achieve food security in their local community (White 2011a). In this issue, Carter (2019) draws on observations of Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN) meetings to analyze women landowners’ experiences conserving Iowan landscapes. The landowners experienced exclusion and othering in their attempts to gain information about and implement conservation. Nevertheless, some resisted and overcame the barriers of dominant industrial and gendered agricultural narratives by pursuing conservation goals. This research highlights the importance of women agricultural networks as sites for women to voice challenges and gain information to enact conversation goals.

Relational Agriculture and Food Justice

In this section, we bring a food justice lens to bear on relational agriculture. In doing so, we discuss the centrality of race and class for scholarship on gender and sexuality in agriculture. We then distill three lessons from food justice scholarship that inform our approach to bringing sexuality into food justice, as called for by Alkon and Guthman (2017, 20) and Kerssen and Brent (2017, 302).

Who can afford to farm? The U.S. agricultural and political economic system is guided by neoliberal policies and ideologies that put small-scale and sustainable farmers at an economic disadvantage (Ayazi and Elsheikh 2015; Guthman 2008b; Leslie 2017a). Accessing land is beginning farmers’ most significant barrier (Ackoff, Bahrenburg, and Schute 2017). Farmers compete for land within a capitalist market, bidding against non-farmers. People who desire the land for non-agricultural uses – such as condos or commerce – can derive higher profits from the land and therefore drive up land prices (Binswanger-Mkhize, Bourguignon, and van den Brink 2009). Consequently, farmers rarely can pay off the land just by farming it. To succeed in this context, farmers must have one sort of “subsidy” or another: either institutional or “personal” (Pilgeram 2019). As we discussed above, women have been systematically excluded from accessing government subsidies and familial-based land inheritance. In this context, which women can afford to farm? If they cannot rely on family wealth to support the business, they often turn to a male partner (Pilgeram and Amos 2015). They may also “self-exploit” by working long hours at below-minimum wages to keep the business afloat (Galt 2013). In this issue, Pilgeram (2019) finds that women sustainable farmers in search of affordable farmland (as close as possible to cultural amenities and urban markets) may rely on migration to navigate these harsh economic realities. In the process, those who bring economic privilege from their previous, often urban, lives contribute to rural gentrification, a topic rarely discussed in the sustainable agriculture literature. As Pilgeram (2019, 15) concludes, “while sustainable farming may have opened up a space for women to farm, it’s a space most available for a very particular kind of women: white, well-educated, heterosexual, and married.”

It is not possible to understand gender and sexual relations in agriculture without seeing them through the lens of race. Racial oppression in U.S. agricultural history and today operates independently of – and not just through – class disparities (Leslie and White 2018). Food justice scholars have done important work documenting racism and resistance in areas critical to farmers’ success, such as (to name just a few): land access (Daniel 2013; Gilbert, Sharp, and Felin 2002; Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017), agricultural loans (Carpenter 2012; Feder and Cowan 2013; Nier 2007), U.S. Farm Bill allocations (Ayazi and Elsheikh 2015), land-grant universities (Peña 2015), farm worker health (Baker and Chappelle 2012; Minkoff-Zern 2014) and working conditions (Bauer and Stewart 2013; Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation and United Farm Workers 2011; Daniel 1982; Holmes 2013; Mize and Swords 2010). These dynamics are not exclusive to the industrial agricultural system, but also pervade sustainable food systems in areas such as farmers markets (Alkon 2012; Alkon and McCullen 2011; Myers 2015; Slocum 2008) and other points of sale (Morales and Kettles 2009; Zitcer 2015), apprenticeships (MacAuley and Niewolny 2016), community food organizations (Ramírez 2015; Slocum 2006), urban agriculture (Reynolds 2015; Roman-Alcalá 2015; White 2010; White 2011a; White 2011b), and other sustainable food spaces (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Guthman 2008a; Morales 2011; Slocum 2007).

An important critique of much of the existing literature on gender and sexuality in agriculture is its disproportionate focus on white farmers and framing of gender relations as if they apply uniformly across races. This special issue, unfortunately, reproduces this pattern to an extent as all papers draw from predominantly white samples. The few examples of women and queer farmers of color in this issue indicate that patterns in gender and sexual oppression and resistance vary at the intersections of race and legal status (Leslie 2019; Wypler 2019). In addition, emerging research on sexually diverse immigrant farmers in California demonstrates how the very meaning of sexuality-related language and community imagination may vary across race, ethnicity, and culture (Lizarazo et al. 2017). Lizarazo et al. (2017) find that while sexually diverse farm workers desired to meet others like themselves, they “did not see themselves as part of any definable LGBTQI community” due to factors like being ignored by mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations; the temporal and transitory nature of much of the farm work; the taboo of discussing sexuality and gender identity in some immigrant farmer circles; and some individuals rejecting language used to label sexual identities. Scholars of gender and sexuality in agriculture should interpret findings like these – as well as the broader state of the literature – as a call to oversample farmers of color and to prioritize research by scholars of color. When researchers end up with predominantly white samples, we must at a minimum critically interrogate the historical and contemporary conditions that reproduce such racialized agricultural geographies, as we have attempted to do in this issue.

Some of the most severe gender discrimination on U.S. farms occurs at the intersections of racism and legal status in the form of sexual violence against women immigrant farmers. Twenty-two percent of immigrant farmers in the U.S. are women (National Center for Farmworker Health 2012), at least 60% of whom are undocumented (Bauer and Ramirez 2017, 4). Eighty percent of these women have reported being victims of sexual violence while working in agriculture (Kominers 2015, 1). These women are especially vulnerable due to a number of factors structural to the U.S. agricultural industry, including “being female in a male-dominated industry, living in poverty, language barriers, being an immigrant, being an indigenous immigrant and oftentimes lacking work authorization” (Kominers 2015, 4). The vast majority of these women do not report the assaults for fear of workplace retaliation, job loss, and deportation (Bauer and Ramirez 2017; Kim et al. 2016; Kominers 2015). Throughout all of this, these women farmers earned only an average of $11,250/year (compared to $16,250 for men) (Kominers 2015, 4). Agricultural workers are exempt from most labor law protections in general (Schell 2002), and there are insufficient legal protections and programs to prevent widespread sexual violence on farms. These disturbing facts should serve as a call for further research into gender and sexual agricultural relations enacted and experienced by farmers regardless of farm ownership or documentation.

Scholars of agriculture sometimes make human rights abuses even more invisible when we do not critically interrogate the very language we use to define our object of study: who is a farmer? This question from the food justice literature is central to appreciating the relationality of agriculture. Following White (2018, 4), we reject the common use of the word “farmer” as a title to be saved for owners and operators of capital, which excludes the racial and gender minorities who have long been the backbone of the food system yet denied access to land ownership (Carpenter 2012; Feder and Cowan 2013; Nier 2007; Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017). It is thus important for us to be transparent that much of this special issue focuses on farm owners and operators (whose land may be wholly or in part rented) and farm workers who have legal status.

Similarly, following food justice scholars, a relational agriculture lens appreciates the social justice work of sustainable food movements but also recognizes that people of color’s historical and contemporary contributions to sustainable food systems are still often neglected. This erasure is exemplified by how scholars often fail to credit African-American soil scientist George Washington Carver as one of the earliest intellectual promoters of organic agriculture or to learn from African-American farmer Fannie Lou Hamer’s organizational and political strategies to liberate workers and build community-based food systems (White 2018).

A third lesson to take from food justice work is that the oppression and resistance farmers face is connected to the disparities experienced by consumers on the other end of the food system. Food justice scholarship has documented the inequalities people of color encounter in accessing healthy, culturally-appropriate, affordable food (e.g. Alkon and Agyeman 2011). However, these analyses rarely consider how sexuality intersects with race to exacerbate food insecurity. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that whereas 13% of heterosexual and cisgender white people have reported not having enough money for food at some point in the last year, the figure jumps to 21% for white LGBTQ+ people (Brown, Romero, and Gates 2016, 15). Food insecurity rates for heterosexual and cisgender Hispanic people are 24% compared to 33% for LGBTQ+ Hispanic people, and 28% for heterosexual and cisgender Black people compared to 42% of LGBTQ+ Black people (Brown, Romero, and Gates 2016, 15).² Food justice scholarship takes a systems perspective by connecting inequalities experienced by food consumers and food producers. While this special issue focuses on producers, relational agriculture invites future research about gender and sexual relations along the food chain. This issue marks the first substantial and collective effort to add sexuality to food justice scholars’ robust analyses of race and class.

Queer Farmers: Re-Orienting Sexual Relations on Farms

The emerging research on queer farmers speaks to the nexus of gender and sexuality studies with food justice, agrifood systems, and sustainability studies. There are no existing quantitative studies on queer and transgender farmers, and the government does not collect information on sexuality and gender identity in the U.S. or USDA censuses.³ Nevertheless, several U.S. and Canadian scholars (Edward 2018; Fellows 1998; Leslie 2017b, 2019; Wypler 2019) and an ecofeminist activist in Catalonia (Durán Gurnsey 2016) have conducted qualitative studies. In addition, an interdisciplinary group of researchers in California carried out a digital storytelling project with sexually diverse immigrant farmers (Lizarazo et al. 2017). Together, these findings build on rural queer and food justice scholarship to document queer farmers’ ecological values, experiences of heterosexism and transphobia, and resistance strategies via networks. They question the ecological and social justice impacts of how heteronormativity structures food production for all farmers through the institution of the family farm. In doing so, this literature questions the scientific validity of considering sexuality a niche topic rather than central to the study of food systems. Below, we briefly review challenges and opportunities of rural queer life; the historical existence of queer farmers and queer agrarian resistance movements; and contemporary scholarship about the lived experiences of queer farmers. We conclude with two studies in this issue that build upon feminist food system scholarship to demonstrate how sexuality shapes farmland access and farmer networks, two components critical for expanding sustainable agriculture.

Since most farmland is rural, the task of understanding queer farmers’ experiences logically begins with the rural queer literature. There is a common perception that rural areas tend to be more heterosexist and transphobic than urban areas – a view known as metronormativity (Halberstam 2005) – but this notion is likely oversimplified and is not supported by conclusive data. However, rural queer people face structural and legal inequalities in accessing queer-inclusive healthcare, sufficient school resources, sexual health programming, and political attention to rural queer priorities (Jerke 2011; Rosenkrantz et al. 2017). Geographic dispersion may make it difficult to find queer communities and partners. Rural areas tend to offer fewer queer-only spaces, thereby exacerbating possible isolation. Furthermore, some rural people engage in same-sex behavior but do not identify as LGBTQ+. For instance, some rural men who have sex with men report that these sexual encounters reinforce their heterosexuality and masculinity (Silva 2017). Given the difficulty of documenting the experiences of queer people who are not open about their sexuality, the prevalence of discreet online same-sex sexual behavior in rural communities (Brewer 2018), and the lack of quantitative data on queer people in general, it is certainly possible that rural heterosexism and transphobia is indeed widespread. This remains an open empirical question.

Yet rural queer scholars warn against metronormative assumptions that all rural communities are oppressive for queer people and that all rural queer people desire to move to urban areas. Taking a historical view, acceptance of rural queer people has varied in different times and places (Gray, Johnson, and Gilley 2016; Howard 2001; Johnson 2013), an important reminder to reject the idea that there is anything natural or innate about rural areas being heterosexist and transphobic. Although rural queer people have long left the countryside to find accepting communities in cities (Fellows 1998), rural queer migration literature documents that not all rural queer people want to leave the countryside, and that rural queer people often go back and forth between the country and cities in their daily lives and over their life courses (Annes and Redlin 2012; Gorman-Murray 2009). Queer people are making lives for themselves in the country; younger generations are using online media to build rural queer communities (Gray 2009) and rural queer organizations are emerging across the country (e.g. Green Mountain Crossroads 2019; Lesbian Natural Resources 2019).

In a landscape of rural challenges as well as opportunities, queer people have always farmed. Fellows’ (1998) collection of gay farmer life histories spans the 20th century, revealing that whether open or not about their sexuality, queer people have long contributed to U.S. agriculture. Shah (2011) documents how men landowners, farm workers, and tenants on early 20th century Pacific farms engaged in border intimacies across racial and class boundaries. In the latter part of the century, Radical Faeries (Hennen 2004; 2008) and Lesbian Separatists (Anahita 2004; 2009) created rural agrarian communities that raised food for self-provisioning. The Radical Faeries began gathering on rural lands in the 1980s to buck hypermasculine gay urban norms and to instead embrace the earth, spirituality, and drag. Though most Faeries only periodically visited their rural “sanctuaries,” some lived and grew food on land (Hennen 2004). Starting in the 1970s, lesbians established intentional communities in the lesbian land – or “landyke” – movement, an amalgamation of radical feminist, back-to-the-land, commune, and environmental movements (Anahita 2004). These communities were often small, land-based, and rural – located on less desirable, and therefore less expensive, land (Anahita 2009). Women in the movement aimed to create a space free from, and in resistance to, patriarchy, sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism (Anahita 2004). They sought to serve as land stewards, cultivate rural skills, and empower themselves as women; landyke communities became means and ends to activism (Anahita 2004). In these efforts, the communities tended gardens, raised animals, and preserved food.

Contemporary literature on queer farmers mostly focuses on the lived experiences of those in agricultural production for consumer markets. Queer farmers in New England (Leslie 2017b) pursued a career in agriculture in part because of reasons related to their gender and sexuality, including gender-inclusive farmer dress, seclusion on the farm to safely process coming out, and development of skills typically done by cisgender men. These farmers encountered less explicit heterosexism than they anticipated in rural areas – especially because neighboring farmers valued their hard work in agriculture – yet nevertheless experienced heterosexist microaggressions by people they relied on for the farm’s economic and ecological sustainability. Durán Gurnsey (2016) interviewed lesbian agroecological farmers in Spain and Catalonia who encountered devaluing and infantilizing microaggressions in rural and sustainable agriculture spaces as they managed the land, decision-making, and machinery – all realms usually dominated by cisgender men. Sexually diverse immigrant farmers in California may face a double-threat of being visible as farmers without legal status as well as being queer in a context where even discussion of sexual and gender diversity can be taboo (Lizarazo et al. 2017).

Many of the existing studies on queer farmers (Durán Gurnsey 2016; Edward 2018; Leslie 2017b) – as well those this issue (Leslie 2019; Wypler 2019) – are based on samples of sustainable farmers. Some participants drew explicit connections between their queerness and sustainable practices (Edward 2018), such as extending the deep questioning inherent to the coming out process to realms beyond sexuality like capitalism and industrial agriculture (Leslie 2017b). Yet LGBTQ+ farm owners may also farm industrially, as suggested by the Cultivating Change Foundation (2019), an organization comprised of LGBTQ+ people in industrial agriculture, sponsored by agribusiness giants like Tyson and Monsanto. This indicates the need for research on LGBTQ+ industrial farmers’ lived experiences in this corporatized social field (which likely has different gender and sexual dynamics). Relational agriculture calls for research that interrogates the relationship between sexual relations, agricultural practices, and sustainability.

Relational agriculture also brings a queer lens to bear on land access. While feminist food system scholarship has highlighted how patriarchy challenges women’s access to land, it often minimizes sexual dynamics such as the cisgender and heterosexual norms and privileges that cisgender women farmers have over those in the queer and transgender communities. For example, women often only could access land through a husband’s land or a husband’s off-farm income (Pilgeram and Amos 2015b). As such, embodying the family farm model – a combined business and sexual partnership – was typically a prerequisite for women’s land access. In other words, cisgender heterosexual women who were at a disadvantage in accessing farmland because they were women may have exerted their cisgender and heterosexual privilege to access land through a husband. In contrast, LGBTQ+ people long lacked the right to marry. Since earning marriage equality in 2015, many queer people still reject the institution for its heteronormative way of organizing relationships that excludes single, polyamorous, and low-income people from receiving state recognition and benefits (Bernstein 2015). Queer people are also more limited than heterosexual people in saving for land through an off-farm job, as they are paid less on average (Waite and Denier 2015). In this issue, Leslie (2019) draws on interviews with queer farmers in New England to dissect how finding farmland is tied to labor, credit, and knowledge access, arguing that capitalist markets fail to viably manage their access for small-scale farmers. Farmers compensated by relying on sexual partners to access land, labor, credit, and knowledge, and queer farmers encountered heteronormative barriers to each. To thrive in this context, some queer farmers also developed creative strategies to access these critical resources, an indication that queer agricultural knowledges offer ways of structuring farm and home life beyond the traditional family farm model.

Feminist scholarship has also minimized the combined challenges of patriarchy and heteronormativity within farmer networks for queer farmers. Farmer-to-farmer networks in the U.S. (which in practice are almost always networks among farm owners and operators, with no inclusion of farm workers) historically oriented toward male farmers and industrial agriculture, marginalizing women and particularly those in sustainable agriculture. Women farmers have resisted this exclusion by establishing women farmer networks (Carter 2017; Hassanein 1999; Sachs 1983; Sachs et al. 2016). The scholarship is just beginning to reflect on how queer women, transgender, and non-binary farmers navigate farmer networks, including those created for and by women. In this issue, Wypler (2019) explores how lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer sustainable farmers in the Midwest utilize other farmers to access human resources. At times, the farmers encountered heteropatriarchal barriers in farmer networks – even those created to resist patriarchy – and turned to queer farmer networks and queer labor market opportunities as less heteropatriarchal alternatives to access human resources.

The experience of immigrant farmer Cruz Alberto Sanchez-Perez (known as “Beto”) illustrates the urgency for more research about queer farmers, especially at the intersections of race and legal status. Beto fled sexuality-based persecution in his home country to work as a dairy farmer in Vermont. A valued member of Justicia Migrante (2019) – the Vermont-based economic justice and human rights group – and Pride Center of Vermont (Phelps 2019), Beto is a leader among immigrant farmers and especially among those who are also queer. Beto was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and was facing deportation when a groundswell of grassroots support helped him obtain asylum. This hard-earned victory is, unfortunately, an exception rather than the norm; queer and transgender immigrant farmers regularly face oppression in both the U.S. and their countries of origin (Hannan 2016).

Future qualitative and quantitative research should oversample queer farmers of color and transgender and non-binary farmers. Larger and more diverse samples of queer farmers will help researchers discern possible differences within the queer farmer umbrella, especially along the lines of race, gender, age, and legal status. More research is also needed on queer farmers’ experiences and networks in different geographic regions, especially internationally. Institutionally speaking, the existing research on queer farmers speaks to the need for more studies that utilize a queer lens on agricultural immigration and citizenship; the role of marriage in organizing food production; access to governmental and extension agricultural resources and subsidies; and rural healthcare – both in terms of queer-specific healthcare needs and in terms of farmers using marriage to access healthcare through a sexual partner. Queer farmers – especially those who do not own the means of production and who may be undocumented – have specific healthcare needs (National LGBT Health Education Center and Farmworker Justice 2015). Furthermore, as evidenced by the existence of the Gay Farmer Helpline (2019), queer farmers may face particular challenges related to mental health and suicide.

Future research can draw on the networks that queer sustainable farmers have been actively creating for at least a decade. Internationally, queer farmers in British Columbia, Canada created a “Homo Grown” calendar in 2014 and those in Melbourne, Australia published zines in 2016. Brazilian farmers affiliated with La Vía Campesina are debating issues related to gender and sexual diversity in agriculture (La Vía Campesina 2017). In the U.S., queer farmers in New England, New York, and the Midwest have organized events at sustainable farming conferences and created their own independent gatherings. Inspired by the Bay Area’s Rainbow Chard Alliance, Jonah Mossberg filmed the documentary Out Here that profiles queer sustainable farmers across the U.S. (Mossberg 2013; Underhill 2015). These are just a few examples of queer farmers’ burgeoning efforts to organize for a more relational agriculture.

Conclusion: Toward a More Relational Agriculture

This special issue brings together new empirical research on how women and queer farmers experience gender and sexual relations in U.S. farming today. Taking the standpoint of gender and sexual minorities in agriculture reveals the impacts of the continued reproduction of agrarian heteropatriarchy on the lives of women and queer farmers. It also illuminates the often-hidden ways that gender and sexual relations organize food production on all farms, calling for gender and sexuality to be understood as central to the study of food systems, rather than a niche topic. We began with a history of how the U.S. state – exemplified by 4-H – contributed to orienting a particular set of agrarian gender and sexual relations in an effort to construct a family farm conducive to industrial agriculture (Rosenberg 2015; 2016). As we have shown, women and queer farmers do not simply accept today’s iteration of oppressive gender and sexual relations, but some actively re-orient them to create new opportunities for social justice and ecological sustainability on farms (Carter 2019; Leslie 2019; Pilgeram 2019; Shisler and Sbicca 2019; Wypler 2019). We have sought to develop an ecofeminist and queer understanding of relational agriculture as a lens for drawing attention to gender relations and also sexual relations in agriculture. In doing so, we argued for bringing sexuality into the concept of food justice and for recognizing gender as an important force in the development of sustainable practices. With a relational agriculture lens, it is evident that achieving a socially just and ecologically sustainable agriculture demands calling attention to and re-orienting heteropatriarchal relations in farming.

In this introduction, we have highlighted ways that heteropatriarchy organizes the food system. While increasing the representation of women and queer farmers is an important step toward food justice, it alone does not address the roots of systematic gendered and sexualized inequalities in agriculture. Rather, achieving a more relational agriculture in practice demands structural changes that pay keen attention to gender, sexual, race, and class relations. The following policy changes are one step in this direction and will improve the lived experiences of women and queer farmers. First, there should be increased funding for USDA programs that assist historically underserved farmers and ranchers. Second, LGBTQ+ farmers should be added to the list of groups included in the USDA’s Minority and Women Farmers and Ranchers program (USDA 2018). Third, the USDA should increase its fledgling efforts for reaching out to rural LGBTQ+ people, which began with the Obama administration’s USDA LGBT Rural Summit Series (Brant 2015). Fourth, to provide support systems for rural women and queer farmers amongst a stifling culture of hegemonic masculinity, funding should be allocated for queer and women farmer organizations, which research shows have helped queer farmers thrive (Wypler 2019) and women farmers become “changemakers” (Carter 2017). Fifth, because of the general lack of queer support networks in agriculture and the importance of queer farmer mentors to beginning queer farmers (Leslie 2017b, 2019; Wypler 2019), agricultural apprenticeship programs should offer the option for mentor farmers to list themselves as “LGBTQ+” or “LGBTQ+ friendly.” Sixth, states can follow California’s lead in enacting legislation similar to the 2017 Farmer Equity Act to bring more socially disadvantaged farmers into the policy-making arena (Collins 2017), but should include LGBTQ+ farmers in the list of groups that qualify. Seventh, agricultural labor and immigration protections must be overhauled to end human rights abuses in agriculture, which are disproportionately experienced by women and LGBTQ+ farmers (Bauer and Ramírez 2017; Bauer and Stewart 2013; National LGBT Health Education Center and Farmworker Justice 2015). Finally, the USDA Agricultural Census should collect quantitative data on sexual orientation and provide a broader array of options for reporting gender identity. While not comprehensive, these recommendations offer a glimpse of the sorts of actions that can be taken to build a more relational agriculture.

Agriculture has always been relational. We just haven’t understood it that way – at least not recently. Heteropatriarchy captured the beast of capitalist agriculture and used it to enforce, and reinforce, its power inequalities. Part of that enforcement and reinforcement was envisioning food and agriculture as pure matters of production and consumption, and not as social, economic, and ecologic arrangements that inscribe advantage just as they give us meaning, pleasure, and intimacy in life. By narrowing our understanding of the agricultural act, capitalist heteropatriarchy blinded us to its hierarchies. For to envision relational agriculture is to be mindful that social relations are always power relations, and thus susceptible to the machinations of injustice.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jane Collins, Steph Tai, and Monica White for their thoughtful feedback and guidance on this paper.

Notes

Notes

1 4-H originated in the boys’ and girls’ clubs established by the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, which also established the Cooperative Extension Service. Although programs were managed locally – such as by land-grant universities – the Smith-Lever Act gave the USDA the power to approve or disapprove of local programming and budgets. As Rosenberg (2015, 45–46) argues, “The [Smith-Lever Act] was a vital piece of state building that provided early twentieth-century national government with a means to monitor and regulate America’s sprawling rural spaces.”

2 Brown, Romero, and Gates (2016) did not find statistically significant differences between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ food insecurity rates for Asian and Pacific Islanders (10–12%) or American Indian and Alaskan Native (30–32%) groups.

3 The 1978 change to the census of agriculture added the option for cisgender women to be counted as farmers (Hoppe and Korb 2013, iv), but reinforces a binary view of gender that excludes transgender, genderqueer, and non-binary people.