Website For Women Farmers

Website For Women Farmers

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Because her jump from being a full-time special education teacher to being a successful lavender farmer attracted attention and interest from women nationwide, Vivian Nielsen, owner of Garden Gate Farms in Medical Lake, decided to take a website gifted to her years ago by her brother and turn it into a website “dedicated to helping women across the United States and Canada use their land to grow their passion for farming”.

NIELSEN: I kept getting phone calls from all over the United States. I mean I had everything from CEO’s of big companies saying “ I want to farm”, “I want to quit my job”, “I want something less stressful”, “how do I do that”, to people in Chicago who lived in apartments and wanted to know if they could do some sort of farming on their balconies, and they wanted to start farmers markets. It’s been an amazing journey to meet women of all types and all interests and chat with them over the phone.

Nielsen says that until recently the website was quite simple.

NIELSEN: Really honestly, the website was basically my name and address and this is what I do and really that’s all it was. So then this last year I decided that I want to change the website to a subscription website where there would be a lot of free information, but there’s also a small subscription fee for those who are very serious about becoming a woman farmer or becoming a hobby farmer that makes profit. So what I’m doing right now is I’m putting the curriculum together so that eventually women can come in and get an organized way of how do you start a farm.

Tomorrow Nielsen will talk about what women visiting the womenfarmers.org website will find there.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.