Incorporating Women’s Voices Into Wyoming Rangeland Research and Extension

Abstract

Those of us involved in agriculture are familiar with the alarming “statistic” that the United States only has 2 million agriculturalists. We hear this state- ment almost as often as we hear that family farms and ranches are the foundation of American agriculture. A closer look at the data collected by the US Census of Agri- culture over the past decade sheds new light on both of these statements. Until 2002 the US Census of Agriculture did not collect demographic information on more than one operator on each farm or ranch, even when operating responsibility was shared between two or more people. With the change in how operators were counted in 2002, we learned that the United States actually had over 3 million operators on 2 mil- lion farms and ranches. Over 800,000 of these operators were women. More recent data tell us that women are a growing demographic of farm and ranch operators, accounting for over 30% of all operators (an 11% increase from 2002) and 10.4% (up from 8.4%) of primary operators on beef opera- tions in 2007, though women tend to run smaller, more di- verse operations.

DOI: 10.2458/azu_rangelands_v35i6_wilmer