Women playing greater role in farming

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MILWAUKEE, Dec 31 (AP): Diane Grezenski grew up a city girl, but now she and her husband run a dairy farm where she has taken on more and more of the work over the years.
"I do almost all the milking, feed the animals, and handle the book work and much of nearly everything else that needs to be done," she said.
The public face of women in agriculture in Wisconsin for 60 years has been Alice in Dairyland, a young woman selected annually to promote the state's farm products. But because of old barriers coming down, men doing other jobs, and mechanical advances, women like Grezenski are more actively involved.
Grezenski's husband does the field work and pitches in on milking when he can, while working full time at a nearby paper mill. The two are increasing the size of their operation from 47 cows to about twice that number, Grezenski said.
"But somebody has to work elsewhere to get health insurance, and often it is the man because they usually can find better paying jobs," she said.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service's most recent agricultural census, done in 2002, showed women were the principal operators of 7,353 Wisconsin farms, up about 27 per cent from 1997. There was about a 13 per cent increase nationally during the same period.
The percentage of Wisconsin's female principal farm operators increased from 6.7 per cent in 1997 to 9.5 per cent in 2002.
Wisconsin had the ninth-highest number of women who were the principal operators of farms, a category led by Texas and California.
"Around the world, women do most of the agricultural work. But there has been more of a male culture around farming in the United States," said Michael Bell, a rural sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "However, that is changing in the same way that women have moved into many other professions."
Mary Kay Van Der Geest, who runs one of Wisconsin's largest milking operations, got into farming after she married a livestock dealer who decided to start a dairy farm near Merrill, in northcentral Wisconsin, with 17 cows in 1969. It's grown to 3,000 cows, and she has headed it since he died in 2000.