SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS / THE PATCHWORK OFFICE : A Bumper Crop of Female Farmers

More and more daughters are taking over the family farm.

Women, particularly in California, are dramatically expanding their roles in agriculture--from working at the research bench to marketing fruits and vegetables to driving the tractor on their own acreage.

Nationwide, while the total number of farms has fallen steadily over the past six decades, more women operate their own farms every year. In 1992, the U.S. Census Bureau found more than 145,000 female farm operators in the country, up 11% from 1987. Women now run more than 7.5% of all U.S. farms.

“They’re coming out of these ag schools . . . bright, articulate, involved directly in farming,” says Bev Hanson Sfingi, who co-founded the statewide support group California Women for Agriculture in 1975. “The days of the little lady making jams and jellies while the husband did the farming are past.”

Kathy Briano does most of her work from the seat of a tractor.

Raised on a farm in the Tulare County town of Porterville, she quit work as a retail store manager more than a dozen years ago and returned to the family farm when her father became ill and stayed after he died. Now she’s her own boss, and with a hired hand and seasonal harvest workers, she raises grapes, cotton, alfalfa, black-eyed peas and oat hay on 400 acres. Briano says she spends 90% of her time out in the field, much of that on a tractor.

“I cut and rake my own hay; I’m not into baling,” she says with a laugh. Briano finds driving the tractor relaxing and gives her a chance to plan.

“You see nature, you see things grow, it’s kind of nice. . . . You can think about your farming and plan for the next day,” she says. “And it’s not physically hard. The machinery does all the work.”

When she first returned to agriculture, women in charge were a rarity in the field, though many women have long labored as hourly wage harvesters.

“I think it was hard for some of my neighbors to get used to the daughter out in the field instead of the son out in the field,” she recalls. Nor were harvest crews used to working for a woman. “But when they see that you know what you’re doing, they accept it,” Briano says.

Traditionally, many of the women running farms have been widows who carry on after losing their husbands. But new factors are swelling the ranks.

For one thing, capable daughters are no longer routinely ruled out when a family decides who will inherit the farm.

“You’re going to hear this over and over again: Most farm families are having trouble keeping the children on the farm,” says Cherry Ishimatsu, who before she retired ran I.K.I. Farms in the Coachella Valley with her husband, Ray.

Ishimatsu, an early advocate of greater roles for women in the industry, ran the office of the family’s citrus and vegetable operation, which used to hire 2,000 workers during the harvest season.

Another reason for more women on the farm: Modern agriculture is full of possibilities for anyone trained in state-of-the-art farm practices, which opens new entry ways into the industry.

The Farm Journal estimated last October that while there is more than a 10% surplus of college graduates who want to go into production farming--growing fruits, vegetables, large row crops or animals--jobs go begging in other agriculture specialties.

The magazine found an 18% shortage of graduates trained in food brokerage and other agricultural marketing and sales work; an almost 13% shortage of trained food inspectors, dietitians and nutrition counselors; a more than 14% shortage in food service managers, agriculture managers and financial specialists, and a 15% shortage of agricultural engineers, animal scientists and other researchers.

“That’s where the good jobs are,” says Carl L. Pherson, associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Agricultural Sciences and Technology at Cal State Fresno. “There is a national shortage of people who are college-educated and have training and background in agriculture. And bright women are the ones who are finding opportunity there.”

John E. Trei, interim associate dean for the college of agriculture at Cal Poly Pomona, reports much the same thing.

“I’ve been at Cal Poly 20 years,” Trei says, “and there is a substantial increase in the number of women getting into all fields of agriculture in the last 10 years. Probably 90% of our students in animal-science majors are women.”

Still, accommodating the differences that women bring to a farm or ranch is a slow process, says Judy Fowler, who recently returned from Washington, where she lobbied Congress on proposed farm legislation.

“It’s just the type of industry it is--traditional,” says Fowler, a flower grower and president of the San Diego Farm Bureau.

Yet in California, women are becoming influential in an increasingly high-tech, competitive, world-market industry. And Fowler and other women say the Farm Bureau and other traditional trade groups are generally supportive of women.

Mary Krause owns and operates her own small Central California farm, raising peaches, plums, nectarines and apricots. She also works as a grower representative--the liaison between growers working on contract and their shippers--for Fresno-based Fowler Packing Co.

And she is the sole woman on the state Plum Marketing Board.

“You’re breaking into a man’s world,” Krause says, “but once you’re accepted, it’s full-fledged. . . . I’m the token woman, the only woman on the board, but they’re getting used to me.

She laughs. “Except when the letters are addressed ‘Dear Gentlemen,’ and then I go bonkers.”