For Tara Sawyer, the term “farm wife” has always been a point of pride.
Sawyer, who farms with her husband, Matt, in Acme, Alta., always felt the term signifies partnership.
“I have always taken great pride in calling myself a farm wife. I am a farm wife, and I’m a stay-at-home mom, and yes, I am farming.”
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In her early years on the farm, Sawyer was busy raising three kids and being involved in the local community. She always played a role on the farm, relying on her education as a legal assistant to help with the administrative side of the business.
But Sawyer realizes not everyone in the industry shares her thoughts on the term. Recent years have seen much debate around the term “farm wife,” with some arguing in part that it devalues the often unpaid work of primarily women in farm businesses and homes, while at the same time enforcing traditional gender roles.
Unpaid work is a concept that has gained more and more attention over the last several decades. In the late 1980s, sociologist Arlene Kaplan gave it a formal name: invisible work. She described invisible work as unpaid labour, mostly performed by women, that often goes unrecognized and under-appreciated.
Since then, there have been ongoing discussions around if and how to recognize and value this invisible labour. A 2019 study concluded that the value of women’s unpaid work in the U.S. that year was $1.5 trillion dollars (at a rate of minimum wage). Some European countries have considered plans to compensate unpaid workers. One of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, accepted by all member nations in 2015, included the need to recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work.
Here in Canada, the federal government released a report in 2021 highlighting the need for more public and policy-related recognition of the unpaid work of women. Another recent study estimated that the value of unpaid labour in Canada is about 15 per cent of the country’s GDP, which is a conservative estimate.
Despite the advancement of these discussions in recent decades, women in North America do a disproportionate amount of unpaid work compared to men. This issue exploded during the pandemic years, when North American parents and caregivers, again primarily women, struggled so significantly with burnout that last year the U.S. Surgeon General declared parental mental health a “critical health priority.”
In the agriculture world, where primary farm operators (mostly men, according to statistics) work long hours outside of the house, it’s likely that the partners who support them (primarily women, according to statistics) shoulder the same or even greater domestic workloads than the average Canadian woman.
So, in light of global discussions around recognizing and valuing the unpaid work of women, has the agriculture industry advanced its collective thoughts and actions around this idea?
Many experts within the industry say yes.
More women are calling themselves ‘farmers’
Growing up on the family farm in Melfort, Sask., Kim Keller watched her mom serve as an equal and integral partner to her dad on the farm: working in the fields, running equipment and more.
“My mom farmed right beside my dad,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for my mom, my dad wouldn’t have able to farm how he did.”
Although she believes this was common at the time, she also believes many of these women still considered themselves “farm wives” rather than farmers.
This has changed — although only incrementally.
In 2021, the Census of Agriculture indicated an increase in female farm operators for the first time in 30 years, with approximately 80,000, or 30 per cent of Canadian farmers being women. Many feel this is still not an accurate number, but it does indicate a shift.
(It’s also relevant to note that Statistics Canada did not allow Canadian farms to list more than one primary operator until 1991, marking another potential reason why Canadian women on farms are disinclined to identify as farmers.)
Keller, who still farms today, believes that part of the reason a growing number of women are identifying as farmers is because their work — which often includes “softer” skills — is increasingly being valued, on the farm and beyond.
“The emotional intelligence, the compassion, the humility — this would have just been considered women’s work before, but now it’s everyone’s work. We’re seeing soft skills recognized as important everywhere.”
In fact, in her off-farm role as an executive at an ag-tech startup company, Ground Truth Ag, based in Saskatchewan, she says the majority of the skills she uses are soft skills.
“In order to be successful in any type of position these days, leadership or not, working with people is one of the most important parts, and people are emotions, people are feelings,” she says.
“Chat GPT can do all the hard stuff. It can’t resolve a conflict between heated or disengaged employees.”
Keller, who has held several leadership roles in the ag sector over the last decade, also believes there’s a greater appreciation for invisible work today because younger generations are sharing the domestic duties much more than previous ones.
According to StatsCan, in the last 40 years men have increased the amount of time they spend doing housework by 24 minutes a day — the exact same amount by which women have decreased their daily household work over the same time frame, reflecting a slow but growing trend toward more equitable participation in household chores.
Women are stepping into more leadership roles
Sawyer believes that as female farmers and farm wives take on leadership roles in the agriculture sector, the sector is also increasingly valuing the contributions women make to the farm, both paid and unpaid.
She says this has been true in her own experience.
Six years ago, as her kids were grown and she had more time on her hands, Sawyer decided to become a director on the Alberta Barley board.
But it was a tough decision for her at first, she says, because she questioned her own abilities to serve as a “farmer” board member.
“I almost wasn’t going to because I thought: I don’t run the machinery, I won’t be able to talk equipment, I won’t be able to talk seed rate.’”
She discussed her concerns with a female mentor, who convinced her that she brought many unique skills and perspectives to the table.
“She said: ‘You don’t have to run the equipment to sit at the board table. You know more than you think you know’,” Sawyer says.
In the early days of her board work, she says she was often recognized as “Matt’s wife,” which she found frustrating.
“I am proud of my husband’s contributions to the industry, but I am my own person,” she says.
Sawyer says that over time her own strong voice emerged, bringing a unique skill set and perspective to the table. Today, she is the first female chair of the Alberta Grains board and has leveraged her leadership skills and experience to guide the organization through significant transitions in recent years.
“I’ve been welcomed to the table, and I have been heard,” she says. “I know it’s because I also I earned the respect. You have to prove yourself.”
Making invisible work visible
Val Panko, a business advisor with FCC, believes the industry is getting better at recognizing the value of invisible work on the farm, but that putting an actual value on it remains difficult.
She says this type of work often becomes “visible” during succession planning.
“That’s when it the invisibility cloak comes off,” she says, adding that this is usually when someone who has done unpaid work for decades decides they don’t want to do it anymore.
Often, there’s no one willing to, or in a position to take over, Panko says.
“The roles in a farm operation and the management are clear cut, the ones behind the scenes aren’t.”
Panko says she has also seen cases where the invisible work has been outsourced as a result of generational changes on the farm, and some businesses are even customized for this, for example, custom catering businesses that deliver hot meals to farmers directly in the field.
Outsourcing forces farms to put a value on this type of labour, also called “sweat equity” in the world of succession planning. There are several tools, or sweat equity calculators, available to help farms do the math.
But Panko believes that calculating the real value of this type of work is a lot more complicated than simply assigning an hourly rate to hours worked.
In her work, she defines sweat equity as “the value that your children might have brought to the business above and beyond their contributed labour and their relative compensation for that labour.”
“I want people to think about it like: ‘How much did having your successor, your child or your partner involved increase your relative net worth or your operational success?’”
Other considerations should include any new ideas, practices, protocols or safety measures that person may have brought into an operation, and how they supported other peoples’ work as well.
Often, the value of these things is immeasurable, Panko says.
“I have many people say to me: ‘I wouldn’t have been farming these past five years if my son wasn’t involved.’ So, that’s five years’ worth of equity in their operation that’s grown because they were able to continue.”
Although Panko believes it remains extremely challenging to assign value to this type of work, she does believe we are making progress.
“I think we are moving in the right direction. I don’t know if we’re better at calculating it, because it’s hard, but I do think we are taking steps forward,” she says.
As for Sawyer, who still goes by “farmer” and “farm wife” interchangeably, she realizes many people still have strong opinions on the topic, and she understands why.
“It means different things to different people.”
For her, the big difference is that she always felt her work and contributions at home, on the farm and at the board table was valued by those who matter, despite the fact that putting an exact monetary value on them remains elusive.
“It is a very touchy title for some people who maybe don’t feel recognized,” she says. “And I think the reason why it didn’t bother me is I have always, always felt seen.”
