A farmer first, a woman second

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BY JOE DUGGAN/Lincoln Journal Star

The farmer pushes down the top wire and crosses the fence, one leg at a time.

The morning sun has softened ground that two days before was covered in snow. Thick, sucking mud makes the two-track paths impassable to tractor or truck.

So the farmer walks.

Rubber boots instinctively find the higher, slightly firmer, spots between the muddy depressions made by cattle.

The farmer grabs a pitchfork, peels hay from the round bale, stabs  a clump and throws it toward the cattle. Cows waddle in, their recently born calves at their sides.

The farmer points to a long, deep split in the bale made by an old, beat-up chainsaw.

“It makes it a lot easier to take hay off the bale,” Virginia Mort says.

Of course she wants to do it easier — she’s a woman. People who think that don’t know farmers.

Farmers always look for easier ways to work. They chuckle inside when they see a nonfarmer expend a lot of labor on the same work they can do without an added heartbeat.

Mort knows tricks like cutting hay bales and not cutting tractor turns too sharp and cutting your losses when the market turns. She knows them because she’s a farmer.

Just a farmer.

“I’m a farmer first, a woman second,” she says.



She wanted to farm

Don and Linna Mort raised four daughters on their farm in Southeast Nebraska.

As the girls grew older, they all helped with big jobs when their father needed extra sets of hands, but he didn’t compel them to do chores.

His third daughter took a deeper interest anyway.

They gave little Ginny a pedal car when she was still a toddler, and she wished it was a tractor. When she got older, a visitor might see the girl riding her bicycle, but in her mind, she was driving a big International Harvester. At last, when she turned 10, her father taught her to drive a real one.

After high school, she thought she might like to teach and coach, so she enrolled at the university. But she quickly knew it wasn’t for her.

She wanted to farm.

Her parents welcomed her home and she went to work with her father. They raised corn, soybeans, milo, alfalfa, red clover and oats. They raised cattle and hogs.

Other farmers respected her father. He took her with him when he went to the elevator or implement dealers, sending the message that she was one of them now.

It worked. She can never recall hearing a taunt or feeling a cold shoulder because of her gender, she said.

“Sometimes I think my father was a man before his time,” she said.

At his side, she learned more about livestock and crops. He taught her how to budget, the ins and outs of markets and how to turn what they raised into money in the bank. And he taught her how to work with the land, to take care of it so it would take care of them.

She can’t even remember everything she taught him, it’s just a part of her, like her blue eyes and her strong hands.

He was patient and wise, but he hated burning daylight. He worked hard and could always find something to keep busy.

He never really retired, but health problems slowed him down. The physical work fell to her, but she didn’t feel alone because he was always in the house to answer questions and “talk farm.”

He died during the harvest of 2004. Her sisters, their husbands and children came to the farm to mourn.

She sought solace in the combine, cutting milo.



Heart of the farm

Women have always been partners on the farm and ranch.

Most hold traditional roles, taking care of children, cooking meals, keeping house. But many farm wives and mothers also are skilled at driving grain trucks, tending livestock or doing myriad other farm work.

No, women farmers and ranchers are nothing new, said Margaret Kester, project coordinator in the Agricultural Economics Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She helps organize the university’s annual Women in Agriculture conference.

“What we find is the woman is usually the heart of the farm,” she said. “She’s the caregiver, she’s the errand girl, a lot of times she’s the accountant. And she can also work out in the fields alongside her husband or son.”

In more recent times, as downturns in the ag economy made it tougher to meet expenses on the farm, women have increasingly sought jobs in town. Extra cash and more importantly, health care benefits, often motivated such decisions.

A smaller number of women are the main operators of their farms and ranches. Just over 3,000 farms in Nebraska were run primarily by women, according to federal Census of Agriculture Data from 2002, the most recent year available. The census counted 49,355 farms in the state that year, meaning women-run farms represented about 6 percent of the total.

Some took over farms after their husbands died or after a divorce, particularly when the farm was in the woman’s family. In Norma Hall’s case, she was the primary farm operator while her husband, Dale, taught high school.

The Elmwood farmer, who is mostly retired now, said she never experienced overt discrimination or harassment, but sometimes when she found herself among a group of male farmers, she caught an unwelcome vibe.

“There was kind of a feeling ‘What’s she doing here,’ you know,” said Hall, who is national secretary for Women Involved in Farm Economics (WIFE).

Other discrimination, however, was less subtle. For example, in the late 1980s, the Farm Service Agency did not classify women farmers as “persons” when it came to commodity  payments and other benefits. WIFE sued the government to allow qualifying women to apply for and receive such benefits.

Hall sees fewer women involved in farming now than in years past. That makes sense because the number of family farms has long been in decline.

Women who work off the farm might find themselves less connected to farm life, Hall said. Other women may own ground, but rent it out to a man.

Still, WIFE continues to work on advocacy and educational issues. At a recent board meeting in Washington, D.C., the organization discussed ethanol, corn prices and country-of-origin labeling.

The kind of issues all farmers care about.



'My joy is farming'

Mort, who has never been married, knows she’s not a typical farmer.

Once, years ago, when she was at the elevator, a local introduced her to a newcomer as “our woman farmer.”

She laughed at the memory.

She’s never been much interested in women’s ag groups because, she said, when she goes to a conference, she’s going to be where the other farmers are, learning about new techniques or research or whatever.

She lives with her mother, is active in her church and otherwise, she farms. She loves to golf, but since her father died, she has less time for it. A vacation means three or four days away, max.

She’s a Republican, albeit a moderate one. But when it comes to the subject of the government, she’s farmer through and through.

“My theory is the government ought to stay out of what I do,” she said. “But I know that’s unrealistic, because they can’t stay out of anything anymore.”

Like other cattle producers, she’s going through calving season right now. It means interrupted sleep to make regular checks of cows and heifers. It means feeding the best hay she raised to mothers nursing their calves.

She and her father got out of pigs years ago. Like many others, they simply weren’t big enough to make money at it.

That’s OK with her. She likes livestock, but it’s not her passion.

“My joy is farming,” she said. “To me, being up on the tractor, smelling the earth, that’s the draw of farming.”

She has about 800 acres to tend; some of it produces hay but most of it produces cash crops. She should have calving wrapped up by April, when she’ll need to be in the fields.

She marvels at the conveniences of modern farm equipment, especially compared to the horse-drawn iron her her father started out using. She said Enya and the soundtrack to the film “Chocolat” make good harvesting music because there are no words to distract her.

She also has good neighbors who come to help with just a cell call. She tries to help them back as much as she can.

“They talk about Midwestern values,” she said, “isn’t that what Midwestern values are all about?”

Her family also helps on the farm during busy times. Her city-living brothers-in-law can do a lot and she loves teaching her nephew and nieces about the farm, feels like she’s connecting them to their heritage. Two years ago, her niece Claire Adams of Lincoln worked at the farm all summer.

Adams, a psychology major at UNL, said she enjoyed the experience immensely. It gave her a deeper respect for her aunt in particular and farmers in general.

“I don’t know if I could be that dependent on the weather,” Adams said. “If it rained, there was nothing we could do. And if it didn’t rain, there was nothing we could do to make the crops grow.”

But none of it seemed to worry Mort too much. Once, when Adams was pulling the windrower out of the shed, she misjudged the turn and knocked an electrical box off the pole near the house.

Feeling like an idiot, she radioed her aunt and told her about it. Mort laughed and said not to worry. Making mistakes is a part of farming.

At that moment, she must have felt a little like her father and must have seen a younger version of herself in her niece.

“Through my father having patience with me, I have patience with them.”



'Hup, hup'

As she makes her morning rounds, she sees a new arrival — a little shaggy red ball a pile of dry straw.

After a couple of hours, she returns to herd the cow-calf pair into a different pen, one that’s less muddy.

“Hup, hup,” she says. The cow snorts and takes a couple of quick steps in the farmer’s direction.

The farmer backs off for a moment and gives the cow time. The calf shakily gets to its feet.

“Hup, hup.”

The cow turns toward pen and her calf follows.

“There you go, good girl.”

Another calf born.

Another day closer to planting season.

Another season in the life of a farmer.

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.