Women farmers in Michigan
‘Creating and maintaining community around food, farming and the earth’

By ISABELLA J. ROWAN

A fairy princess. A mommy. A nurse. The president. These are the things a little girl usually dreams of becoming when she grows up. But not Jane Bush. She wanted to be a farmer.

“It was one of those childhood things,” she said. “I really romanticized the idea of owning a farm.”

And so, 17 years ago, Bush purchased AppleSchram Orchard in Charlotte from her uncle. He was a conventional grower. She is far from conventional. Bush is one of a growing community of farm women across the country with a commitment to sustainable agriculture.

The basic principle of sustainable agriculture is stewardship of both natural and human resources. Sustainable agriculture addresses the long-term health of the earth and the life it sustains — both human and non-human. It seeks to meet the needs of the present while preserving the land and other natural resources for generations to come.

Respecting the past

Elaine Yaw/City Pulse

Jane Bush manages the Farmer’s Egg Cooperative from her farm and apple orchard on West Mount Hope Highway.

“Sustainable agriculture cares for the soil and the water and is attentive to the health and welfare of workers,” said Laura DeLind, an anthropologist at Michigan State University. “It respects the past and creates opportunities for the future.”

The practice of sustainable agriculture is in direct response to the large-scale, industrial-based, profit-seeking farm conglomerates that nearly monopolize food production.

“While very productive, there are significant problems with this type of agriculture,” DeLind said.

Soil depletion. Groundwater contamination. The decline of family farms. Neglect of the living and working condition of farm laborers. These are just a few of the repercussions of modern agriculture. “Each time we wipe out a natural process, we try to find a synthetic scientific way to produce the same result but with a short-term purpose in mind,” she said.

With the focus on volume and mass production, the use of chemicals is increased.

“As the chemical inputs go up, the nutritional values go down,” Bush added.

After she bought the farm she started reading what was on the bag of chemicals that was going into the soil. Bush didn’t like what she saw so she began to educate herself about insects and their life cycles and which ones like apples. She looked at the nutritional value of the orchard. The trees and the soil had to go through “quite a period of detoxing.”

“We’re up against a lot of entrenched ideological thinking in agriculture,” Bush said. “I don’t use any chemicals. I use orange oil and fermented garlic juice, which act as a barrier to repel bugs. And I use a lot of compost.”

Women in foreground

In defiance of this entrenched ideology is a huge local food movement that is sweeping across the nation. And women are at the forefront.

DeLind

AppleSchram was one of the first orchards in the state of Michigan to be certified organic. The 40-acre farm, which produces approximately 8,000 bushels of apples per year, also produces pears, peaches, vegetables and buckwheat.

The 1997 Census of Agriculture, which is compiled every five years, reported 165,102 female-operated farms in the United States. This is a 14 percent increase from 1992. The report also showed that nearly 80 percent of these women operators fully owned their farm or ranch.

The number of women farmers is increasing. And they don’t lease their land; they own it. This is a sign of solidarity and commitment. “What we’re trying to do is create and maintain relationships and community around food, farming and the earth. These are pretty basic concepts,” said DeLind, who is also a founding member of Growing in Place community farm in Mason.

“For things to change, men really need to kind of buck up, move over and listen to women,” Bush said. “Women are the feminine part of what needs to happen. Women’s voices have to be heard.”

On film, in print

A woman who has devoted more than a decade to the cause of women farmers and helping them be heard is Cynthia Vagnetti. The independent scholar, photographer and documentary filmmaker has traveled thousands of miles of rural roads to capture on film and in print the details of the lives of American farm women. Including Jane Bush of AppleSchram Orchard.

After Vagnetti was accepted to an MFA fellowship program to document the “social and economic changes in rural America,” she came in contact with farmers who were managing a rural crisis hotline.

“I was introduced into a farmer-to-farmer crisis group where third and fourth generation farmers were losing their farm operations,” she said. “It was the beginning of this journey and the realization of the blatant impact of industrialized agriculture.”

Vagnetti was witnessing the disintegration of a way of life and while the men were doing the talking, she realized it was the women who were maintaining some semblance of life and were the force behind choosing sustainable farming and alternative marketing practices.

“Women are the fastest growing sector of owning and managing small farms in the United States,” she said. “They are moving out from behind their male counterparts and reclaiming their historical role as farmer, gatherer and community connector within the context of a new food system.”

In the years following her graduate work, she has continued to document people all over the United States who are advancing bold new ideas. In the tradition of Dorothea Lange, a photographer from the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, Vagnetti shoots in the recognized format of black and white archival film and prints.

Side by side

She participates in the lives of the people she photographs through living side by side with them, observing their daily lives and listening to their hopes and visions for self-reliant food systems and sustainable development.

“I realized the conversations were as powerful as the images,” she said. Vagnetti captions her photographs with excerpts from conversations.

Through a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council, Vagnetti came to Michigan to begin work on the documentary film, “Voices of Michigan Farm Women.” The project is a collaborative effort with DeLind and another MSU scholar, Julie Avery; Wayne State scholar, Kami Pothukuchi; and the Michigan Farmers Union.

The Michigan project is the foundation of a national exhibition “Voices of American Farm Women.” It is an anthology of work, but emphasis is on women in the Midwest.

“There are six Michigan farm women who are on the land producing, having very strong opinions and passionate about their work, family and community,” Vagnetti said. Bush is one of six women featured in the film.

“She (Vagnetti) was hanging around for like four days,” Bush said. “Personally, it was a lot of fun to have somebody take such an intense interest in what I do.

“It’s really an untold story,” she added. “Women are at the forefront of this local, sustainable food system movement. And it just so happens that women give birth. I think there’s a connection there.”