REDUCE, REUSE, REVOLUTIONIZE Female farmers cultivate sustainability and equality BY CHANNING SMITH
Dela Ends loves to experiment in the kitchen with all the fresh vegetables she grows. Scotch Hill’s website features some of her favorite recipes.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHANNING SMITH
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ood and wine. That’s the foundation of Soil Sisters, Dela Ends says. Ends and I sit on the patio outside her house on Scotch Hill Farm in Brodhead, Wisconsin, about 40 minutes south of Madison. The top of her sunburned nose pokes out from her gray cloth mask, the marking of long days in the sun. An array of plants in mismatched pots decorate the patio among the first of falling autumn leaves. At Ends’ feet, an old Jack Russell terrier and a corgi puppy whip around, competing for her attention. The dogs are in good company with the sheep, pigs and chickens who also call this farm home. Although the world paused to curb the coronavirus, the hard work of running a farm doesn’t stop. Farmers like Ends continue to work long days with seed trials, harvesting crops and tending to her animals. Luckily, she has the Soil Sisters as a network of support. Soil Sisters is a group of female farmers assembled by Lisa Kivirist in the fall of 2008. After attending a women in farming workshop at the Willy Street Co-op in Madison, Kivirist went home, dug out a map and drew an hour’s drive radius around her own farm. She identified all the womenowned farms in her area and invited the owners to a potluck dinner. “So, we just started sharing thoughts and ideas — it was a safe place,” Ends says, remembering the first Soil Sisters gathering. “Food and wine is the foundation.” And as most of these women were growing their own food, the meal was top-notch. Female farmers now make up 36% of farmers in the United States, an almost 27% increase from 2012, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture by the USDA. While running a female-owned farm in a male-dominated industry posed its own challenges to building
community, Kivirist was excited and eager to meet a group of like-minded women. “We had no agenda, no master plan. We just thought, ‘Let’s gather,’ and not surprisingly, we wanted to gather again,” Kivirist says. About a dozen women met for dinner on Kivirist’s farm that first night. Some were organic farmers, some were gardeners, some were homesteaders, but they all had a passion for sustainability. While the group has its roots in a simple social gathering, the Soil Sisters are not afraid to get their hands dirty. Collectively, the group has successfully sued for the right to sell home-baked goods in Wisconsin, one sister has run for both the state Senate and Assembly, others have served as town clerk and treasurer, started over a dozen CSAs (communitysupported agriculture farms) and other farm-related enterprises, and advocated fiercely for sustainability and independent farming. While the pandemic hasn’t made things easier for the Soil Sisters, they are finding ways to pivot and adapt. April Prusia shifted her farmstay to long-term rentals. Jen Riemer of Riemer Family Farm now offers curbside pickup and delivery of her selection of hormone-free meats. “There’s a lot of creativity there — reinventing in different ways,” Kivirist says. “But I think there’s a lot of opportunity because, again, people are looking for the kind of things we’ve been doing, we’ve been growing, we’ve been promoting for years now.” What people are looking for is food that’s grown and sourced locally, with an emphasis on sustainability. Several of the Soil Sisters’ farms are engaged in community-supported agriculture, a direct subscription-like
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