Women Landowners

Women Landowners

Rick Worthington
Rick Worthington
Increasingly, women are the landowners of farms, but they often lack access to conservation programs and resources. That's why the American Farmland Trust (AFT) is starting its Women for the Land initiative.

Jennifer Fili-piak with AFT says the key is to get information to an often-overlooked group: non-operating landowners, meaning owners who aren't farming the land themselves.

Filipiak says women have shown a lot of interest in conservation, but don't always know where to start.

"There are gender barriers. Those barriers are very real," she insists. "I've talked to hundreds of women landowners in the Midwest, and I hear it pop up again and again. You know, agriculture is dominated by males, and so it's sometimes hard for them to get the information."

Across the country, more than 300 million acres are farmed or co-farmed by women.

The organization is providing technical assistance and advocating for policy changes to help women landowners. Filipiak says there's a lot owners can do to help their land, and offers a few examples:

"Wanting to protect the soil from erosion, wanting to rebuild organic matter in the soil, wanting to have good pollinator habitat and beneficial insects on your farm, wanting to make sure that the water that runs off the farm is clean and it's not taking soil and fertilizer with it - these are all things that we can manage," she says.

Nearly 90 million acres are in the hands of women landowners.

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