DeNae Friedheim of Lansing shows off the unique design inside of a
Chioggia beet. She switched the focus of her career from aiming to be a
doctor in public health to now being a farmer and teaching horticulture
at Michigan State University.
No longer a safety engineer in the insurance industry after a 2009 layoff, Joannee DeBruhl asked herself, "Now what?"
She volunteered at a community garden, helped harvest 2,100 pounds of produce and had "the best summer of my life."
Now the 51-year-old is a full-time farmer at a certified organic farm in Brighton, which she co-owns with 24-year-old Shannon Rau and Rau's father, Tom Rau. The two women tend to 48 crops - from corn and cilantro to red mung beans and radishes - while providing fresh produce to 100 farm members and area markets.
"It was not on my list of things I wanted to do when I grew up," said DeBruhl of Brighton. "But I actually found my passion. I feel very fortunate."
She's not alone. More and more women are finding their passion in farming.
Michigan saw a 17.6% increase from 2002 to 2007 in the number of female farmers, according to the 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture five-year census. There were 26,539 female farmers in Michigan in 2007, and that number is expected to skyrocket in the new census, scheduled for February release, reflecting greater participation by women in small-scale and organic farming.
The compulsion to cultivate dovetails with several trends, experts say. Among them: the explosion of farmers markets and Grow Local campaigns. There's also a stronger emphasis on eating healthy and organic, and a bigger awareness of vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free diets. More women are going into business for themselves. And post-layoff or early retirement, some are looking to build an "encore" career that features components of community service.
"Many women are coming in as small-scale farmers looking for a niche market, looking to change what they're not happy with - whether it's the food they're feeding their kids or what their schools buy, or how they manage their own economy in the home," said Michelle Napier-Dunnings, director of Michigan Food and Farming Systems, a Lansing nonprofit designed to help minorities and women in farming.
Women, she said, are "figuring out new ways to sustain their families, their neighborhoods, their school systems, their communities."
Transforming the city
In Detroit and other urban areas in Michigan, small-scale farming has transformed vacant lots in abandoned and scarred sections. The produce, often sold at Eastern Market or makeshift stands, has helped diversify the choices for shoppers in urban areas.
Marilyn Barber, 57, of Detroit was laid off from a university employment service job and now farms and teaches small-scale farming to others at Earthworks farm on the site of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen on the city's east side. This, from a woman whose own mother called to remind her to water the backyard garden that mom traveled from Columbus, Ohio, to plant.
"The passion hadn't hit me," joked Barber, while recently tending Earthworks' Thursday farm stand. "Now, I call my mom and say, 'Guess what we grew today.'"
Akilah Muhammad, 31, of Detroit learned farming techniques at Earthworks and is using them to start a vegetarian catering business.
"How many children can say, 'My mommy grew this and picked this and now I'm eating it,'" said Muhammad, "and I think there's a growing desire for this kind of food."
Small-scale farms and community gardens also have become urban tourist attractions.
On land across from the Westin Book Cadillac hotel in downtown Detroit, Ohio-born Gwen Meyer, 27, tends the earthly abundance arising from Lafayette Greens, a bountiful urban garden bankrolled by nearby Compuware.
It contains 35 elevated beds of vegetables interspersed with flowers and herbs, and tables for downtown workers and tourists to visit on the 3/4-acre site.
"We're not a production farm. We're growing for education, esthetics and beauty," said Meyer, a college English major who opted for hands-on horticulture instead of a law career. The farm produces about 1,800 pounds of produce annually, much of it going to Gleaners Community Food Bank and Freedom House refugee center.
State offers crop variety
Michigan is a productive place to undertake farming.
"It's the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, second only to California," in variety of crops grown, said Jennifer Holton, communications director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Laurie Thorp works with an organic farming certificate program at Michigan State University. The nine-month intensive program is designed for people who are serious about farming as a career. It accepts only 15 students per year, but two-thirds of them are women, said Thorp, who is MSU's director of the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment. Many of the women are career-changers, she said, and nearly half are older than 30.
Women have always farmed, but now they're proud to call themselves farmers, says Wynne Wright, an MSU professor who has researched female farming history.
"Women have always played a critical role in agriculture since the settlement of this country," said Wright. "But it's been invisible. Their work has been devalued, and they've operated behind the scenes with no recognition of the contribution that they've made to American agriculture."
What academics call the "feminization of agriculture" also reflects work that "men have decided they don't want to do," said Wright.
Rather than impersonal, mechanized agribusiness farming, women are gravitating to small-scale farming that is very consumer-based, and doesn't require barns or silos because the food is going right from farm to farmers market. It's made farming more doable.
"Women sit at the nexus between production and consumption," said Wright. "They see the impact of food on the health and bodies of their children."
Wright grew up on a Kentucky farm and said her mother would never have called herself a farmer. Wright and her peers "couldn't run away fast enough" from the farm. "In rural Kentucky, it wasn't hip and cool" to dig, plant and do the often backbreaking work of cultivation.
"But now," said Wright, "a young woman with a college education ... is proud to say she's a farmer."
Road to the field
That's what Denae Friedheim calls herself.
Friedheim, 30, who grew up in a Dallas suburb, was supposed to be a public health specialist or a doctor. But en route to a master's degree at the University of Michigan she got her hands dirty in a summertime organic farm and switched her focus toward a health movement of another kind.
She found herself unexpectedly challenged intellectually and physically, and insatiably curious, she said. For the first time, she said, she made "an emotional connection to her food."
"It still felt like I was doing the work of public health, but in a different way," said Friedheim. "I ended up falling in love with it, deferred my grad school and then never went."
Now she's a farmer in Bath, Mich., growing watermelon radishes, San Marzano tomatoes, winter spinach flowers and 20-plus other crops primarily for local restaurants. One of her specialties is microgreens, mini-arugula or fennel often used as colorful garnishes to brighten a restaurant dish.
Friedheim runs Foodshed Farm from just 1 rented acre. She has a heated greenhouse, where she's about to put in the winter spinach and kale. And she has a passive-solar hoop house she made herself. She also has finished the first year of a three-year business plan that by 2015 should produce enough revenue to support herself and the full-time employee she has hired to start in January.
Her mother tells her to keep her part-time job with Michigan State University, where she's an instructor in the MSU certificate program that taught her - and is teaching others, mainly women - how to become certified in organic farming.
At St. Mary's College in Indiana, Friedheim studied biology and sociology. Both have come in handy, she said. Sociology studies have helped her with marketing her products.
Farming, she says, "engages all my senses."
"It allows me to be a steward of the land, and let's me be creative," said Friedheim. "Running a business is like a game. It's fun and I'm never bored. And the thought of being indoors all the time - I don't think I can handle it."
"It felt like a very natural fit," she said, "and I couldn't imagine doing anything else."
Making it work
Every day at Stone Coop Farm, DeBruhl writes a to-do list on the shed's blackboard.
"Thin parsnips. (Wear gloves!)"
"Dig up parsley, flat and curly."
"Till open potato beds."
The reminders are intended for her and business partner Rau, as well as Stone Coop Farm's member volunteers.
DeBruhl and Rau are paid with money earned by selling shares to folks who take home farm-fresh produce weekly. One of their plans costs $36 a week to receive a harvest of six to 12 vegetables, each type of produce good for four servings. Members get a cut in price for volunteering on the farm. Stone Coop also sells to local stores and restaurants.
DeBruhl met Rau at a Brighton community garden where DeBruhl volunteered after her layoff, as did Rau after graduating from college. Both wanted to continue to cultivate the camaraderie and goodwill and good eats they experienced, and pitched in with Rau's father to buy land and open up Stone Coop Farm.
Right now, although the land is producing, it's not producing sustainable salaries. DeBruhl said she couldn't make it without her husband, who restores barns for a living, including two at Stone Coop Farm, that are more than 100 years old. DeBruhl said she believes Stone Coop is on track to greater profitability in the future.
DeBruhl's business partner, Rau, says she's coping.
"It's one of those things that you learn to enjoy different things, and for me, money is not a huge concern as doing what I love doing," said Rau. "It's a romantic view on it, but that's how I feel about it."
Both women feel energized by the participation of the volunteers, all working together and defining community. Their past experiences, they say, mesh together in running the farm.
"I've done sales; I've done training; I've done consulting; I've had a home garden, and I have a background in forestry and engineering and all of that meshed together," said DeBruhl. "My entire journey has led me right here to this moment. The soil has tons of different microorganisms that make it super-nutritious for the plant. And my life has been nourished by everything I've done before."
Farming mixes together a variety of DeBruhl's skills, much like ingredients in a hearty vegetable stew.
Call her an entrepreneur, says DeBruhl. "Which I am. I just happen to be a farmer."
Now the 51-year-old is a full-time farmer at a certified organic farm in Brighton, which she co-owns with 24-year-old Shannon Rau and Rau's father, Tom Rau. The two women tend to 48 crops - from corn and cilantro to red mung beans and radishes - while providing fresh produce to 100 farm members and area markets.
"It was not on my list of things I wanted to do when I grew up," said DeBruhl of Brighton. "But I actually found my passion. I feel very fortunate."
She's not alone. More and more women are finding their passion in farming.
Michigan saw a 17.6% increase from 2002 to 2007 in the number of female farmers, according to the 2007 U.S. Department of Agriculture five-year census. There were 26,539 female farmers in Michigan in 2007, and that number is expected to skyrocket in the new census, scheduled for February release, reflecting greater participation by women in small-scale and organic farming.
The compulsion to cultivate dovetails with several trends, experts say. Among them: the explosion of farmers markets and Grow Local campaigns. There's also a stronger emphasis on eating healthy and organic, and a bigger awareness of vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free diets. More women are going into business for themselves. And post-layoff or early retirement, some are looking to build an "encore" career that features components of community service.
"Many women are coming in as small-scale farmers looking for a niche market, looking to change what they're not happy with - whether it's the food they're feeding their kids or what their schools buy, or how they manage their own economy in the home," said Michelle Napier-Dunnings, director of Michigan Food and Farming Systems, a Lansing nonprofit designed to help minorities and women in farming.
Women, she said, are "figuring out new ways to sustain their families, their neighborhoods, their school systems, their communities."
Transforming the city
In Detroit and other urban areas in Michigan, small-scale farming has transformed vacant lots in abandoned and scarred sections. The produce, often sold at Eastern Market or makeshift stands, has helped diversify the choices for shoppers in urban areas.
Marilyn Barber, 57, of Detroit was laid off from a university employment service job and now farms and teaches small-scale farming to others at Earthworks farm on the site of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen on the city's east side. This, from a woman whose own mother called to remind her to water the backyard garden that mom traveled from Columbus, Ohio, to plant.
"The passion hadn't hit me," joked Barber, while recently tending Earthworks' Thursday farm stand. "Now, I call my mom and say, 'Guess what we grew today.'"
Akilah Muhammad, 31, of Detroit learned farming techniques at Earthworks and is using them to start a vegetarian catering business.
"How many children can say, 'My mommy grew this and picked this and now I'm eating it,'" said Muhammad, "and I think there's a growing desire for this kind of food."
Small-scale farms and community gardens also have become urban tourist attractions.
On land across from the Westin Book Cadillac hotel in downtown Detroit, Ohio-born Gwen Meyer, 27, tends the earthly abundance arising from Lafayette Greens, a bountiful urban garden bankrolled by nearby Compuware.
It contains 35 elevated beds of vegetables interspersed with flowers and herbs, and tables for downtown workers and tourists to visit on the 3/4-acre site.
"We're not a production farm. We're growing for education, esthetics and beauty," said Meyer, a college English major who opted for hands-on horticulture instead of a law career. The farm produces about 1,800 pounds of produce annually, much of it going to Gleaners Community Food Bank and Freedom House refugee center.
State offers crop variety
Michigan is a productive place to undertake farming.
"It's the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, second only to California," in variety of crops grown, said Jennifer Holton, communications director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Laurie Thorp works with an organic farming certificate program at Michigan State University. The nine-month intensive program is designed for people who are serious about farming as a career. It accepts only 15 students per year, but two-thirds of them are women, said Thorp, who is MSU's director of the Residential Initiative on the Study of the Environment. Many of the women are career-changers, she said, and nearly half are older than 30.
Women have always farmed, but now they're proud to call themselves farmers, says Wynne Wright, an MSU professor who has researched female farming history.
"Women have always played a critical role in agriculture since the settlement of this country," said Wright. "But it's been invisible. Their work has been devalued, and they've operated behind the scenes with no recognition of the contribution that they've made to American agriculture."
What academics call the "feminization of agriculture" also reflects work that "men have decided they don't want to do," said Wright.
Rather than impersonal, mechanized agribusiness farming, women are gravitating to small-scale farming that is very consumer-based, and doesn't require barns or silos because the food is going right from farm to farmers market. It's made farming more doable.
"Women sit at the nexus between production and consumption," said Wright. "They see the impact of food on the health and bodies of their children."
Wright grew up on a Kentucky farm and said her mother would never have called herself a farmer. Wright and her peers "couldn't run away fast enough" from the farm. "In rural Kentucky, it wasn't hip and cool" to dig, plant and do the often backbreaking work of cultivation.
"But now," said Wright, "a young woman with a college education ... is proud to say she's a farmer."
Road to the field
That's what Denae Friedheim calls herself.
Friedheim, 30, who grew up in a Dallas suburb, was supposed to be a public health specialist or a doctor. But en route to a master's degree at the University of Michigan she got her hands dirty in a summertime organic farm and switched her focus toward a health movement of another kind.
She found herself unexpectedly challenged intellectually and physically, and insatiably curious, she said. For the first time, she said, she made "an emotional connection to her food."
"It still felt like I was doing the work of public health, but in a different way," said Friedheim. "I ended up falling in love with it, deferred my grad school and then never went."
Now she's a farmer in Bath, Mich., growing watermelon radishes, San Marzano tomatoes, winter spinach flowers and 20-plus other crops primarily for local restaurants. One of her specialties is microgreens, mini-arugula or fennel often used as colorful garnishes to brighten a restaurant dish.
Friedheim runs Foodshed Farm from just 1 rented acre. She has a heated greenhouse, where she's about to put in the winter spinach and kale. And she has a passive-solar hoop house she made herself. She also has finished the first year of a three-year business plan that by 2015 should produce enough revenue to support herself and the full-time employee she has hired to start in January.
Her mother tells her to keep her part-time job with Michigan State University, where she's an instructor in the MSU certificate program that taught her - and is teaching others, mainly women - how to become certified in organic farming.
At St. Mary's College in Indiana, Friedheim studied biology and sociology. Both have come in handy, she said. Sociology studies have helped her with marketing her products.
Farming, she says, "engages all my senses."
"It allows me to be a steward of the land, and let's me be creative," said Friedheim. "Running a business is like a game. It's fun and I'm never bored. And the thought of being indoors all the time - I don't think I can handle it."
"It felt like a very natural fit," she said, "and I couldn't imagine doing anything else."
Making it work
Every day at Stone Coop Farm, DeBruhl writes a to-do list on the shed's blackboard.
"Thin parsnips. (Wear gloves!)"
"Dig up parsley, flat and curly."
"Till open potato beds."
The reminders are intended for her and business partner Rau, as well as Stone Coop Farm's member volunteers.
DeBruhl and Rau are paid with money earned by selling shares to folks who take home farm-fresh produce weekly. One of their plans costs $36 a week to receive a harvest of six to 12 vegetables, each type of produce good for four servings. Members get a cut in price for volunteering on the farm. Stone Coop also sells to local stores and restaurants.
DeBruhl met Rau at a Brighton community garden where DeBruhl volunteered after her layoff, as did Rau after graduating from college. Both wanted to continue to cultivate the camaraderie and goodwill and good eats they experienced, and pitched in with Rau's father to buy land and open up Stone Coop Farm.
Right now, although the land is producing, it's not producing sustainable salaries. DeBruhl said she couldn't make it without her husband, who restores barns for a living, including two at Stone Coop Farm, that are more than 100 years old. DeBruhl said she believes Stone Coop is on track to greater profitability in the future.
DeBruhl's business partner, Rau, says she's coping.
"It's one of those things that you learn to enjoy different things, and for me, money is not a huge concern as doing what I love doing," said Rau. "It's a romantic view on it, but that's how I feel about it."
Both women feel energized by the participation of the volunteers, all working together and defining community. Their past experiences, they say, mesh together in running the farm.
"I've done sales; I've done training; I've done consulting; I've had a home garden, and I have a background in forestry and engineering and all of that meshed together," said DeBruhl. "My entire journey has led me right here to this moment. The soil has tons of different microorganisms that make it super-nutritious for the plant. And my life has been nourished by everything I've done before."
Farming mixes together a variety of DeBruhl's skills, much like ingredients in a hearty vegetable stew.
Call her an entrepreneur, says DeBruhl. "Which I am. I just happen to be a farmer."
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