The United Nations has designated 2026 as the Year of the Woman Farmer, and as part of Pennsylvania’s recognition of March as Women’s History Month, the state agriculture department is putting a spotlight on women-led farms in the Keystone state.
It points out that women make up more than one-third of Pennsylvania’s agricultural producers, and 26,156 of these women farmers in the state are operators who live on the farms they manage.
The Allegheny Front’s Julie Grant spoke with Deanne Weber, who owns Willow Run Farmstead, where she raises cattle to sell to the community in Berks County, and sheep farmer Hannah Kinney Smith, who is executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.
Julie Grant: Deanne, can you tell us about Willow Run, your role there, and how you got into farming?
Deanne Weber: Willow Run Farmstead is a grass fed beef farm located in Berks County, Pennsylvania. I am a third generation farmer, but I initially got pulled in the direction of becoming a librarian instead because I enjoy reading books. I love working with people. So my first job was being a librarian, but I really got pulled back to my farm because I have such a deep connection to the farm that my family has managed for the last two generations.
Julie Grant: Can you talk about sort of what you raised there and how you go about managing your farm?
Deanne Weber: On our farm, we raise grass-fed beef, and my focus is on rotational grazing, so they are pasture-raised. They are fed grass pretty much every day except during the winter when they get hay.
Our focus is very much on conservation and on being environmentally sustainable so we have practices such as silvopasture(integrating trees and livestock.) We have installed (trees as) riparian buffers at our farm and do a lot of work to just build soil health and create a farm that is not only friendly for the cattle, but also for the farmer and then also for wild animals that are also on the farm.
Julie Grant: And your customer base is largely who?
Deanne Weber: My customer base is largely people from my local area, the majority of which live within 20 miles of my farm, which is very cool.
I get to see a lot of my young customers growing up each year when they come pick up their food. So it’s a very community-based food system that we have.
Julie Grant: Since this is the UN’s Year of the Woman Farmer, do you think there’s a different perspective that women bring to farming? Can you share some specifics? Deanne, you can maybe continue what you’re saying and then Hannah, maybe you would like to chime in about that also?
Deanne Weber: I have done a lot of work with specifically women-led groups in farming, and while I can’t say that this is strictly just a women focus thing, I do feel like there is a lot of creative problem-solving that happens in these groups.
So instead of being like, ‘Oh, we’re going to brute-force this problem and find a solution that’s just based on our strength and overpowering the situation,’ it’s a lot more looking at what different solutions we can bring to the problem.
So for example, a lot of my work with cattle is very cattle-focused. So instead of me thinking, ‘Oh, well, I have the right way to do things because I am a human with a smarter brain than these cattle,’ instead, what I do is, I work with them and their instincts, which just makes it a whole lot easier. So if I have a calf that’s lost in the middle of a field, and I can’t find it, I’ll send the mom out to go get it for me. And she does that. So it’s just like the observing of the cattle and realizing that we as humans can step back and learn a lot from these animals, and the plants that we work with.
I would also say there’s a lot of collaboration instead of competition. So working together as women farmers, we’re not competing with one another. We’re actually working to build one another up because we recognize that to feed everyone, there has to be a lot of us. So working together is really important.
Hannah Kinney Smith: I think a lot of what I would say would echo what Deanne has said. I also wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s women alone, that you can say that we have some sort of unique way of farming. But I would say that anybody, who because of their identity has had to navigate dominant systems that weren’t built for them, which much of the agriculture in the United States is not really built for women, you do learn specific skills and ways of navigating those systems that are very helpful. And I think that that does spill over into our farms.
Like Deanne, really the purpose of my farm originally was renovating the pasture and improving the soil health. And that is seeing that ecosystem, right? So those skills are definitely transferable.
Julie Grant: I’m going to get a little more political here. Farmers across the US have been distressed by President Trump’s hike in tariffs and have lost business to countries like China, especially, for big commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Some have called this ‘Farmageddon.’ I wonder if you see less impact generally on farms run by women since, as some statistics show, they’re more likely to serve customers locally. So is that perhaps more stable and less at the whim of the international trade situation?
Hannah Kinney Smith: I would say that all we have to do is harken back to the worldwide pandemic to know that we learned that farms that are selling direct to customer can weather internationally challenging sort of systemic wide crises. And whether it is now with trade internationally or something like the degree to which climate impacts our farms, this systemic thinking and way of approaching, ‘Okay, how do I connect with my local community to make us all stronger,’ plays itself out in this direct-to-consumer market.
Pennsylvania is one of the top states in the nation for direct-to-consumer sales. And I would venture to say that that is led by a lot of women like Deanne.
Deanne Weber: I would just echo what Hannah says with that because we’re a small farm and because we are connected with the community, it does make it easier to shift and change what is happening in our business.
I think that the regenerative and sustainable agriculture focus is on being able to adapt and change depending on what the challenges are. And so that does look at climate change, tariffs, government policies changing. There’s always a shift and move that’s a part of what we do. Prices increasing is always a challenge for everyone across the board.
Julie Grant: Like [farm] inputs? [eg. pesticides and other chemicals]
Deanne Weber: Yeah. Fortunately, I’m a very low input farm. But so that’s a whole other conversation we could have, is that I have a very low input, very low equipment-based farm. So my expenses are very different from what the traditional farm looks like.
Julie Grant: I want to ask both of you, are there specific challenges you see for women farmers?
Deanne Weber: In the past, there’s been frequent times that I am the only woman in the room, and at that time I didn’t know that I was able to take up as much space as everyone else that was there. Through experiences with Pasa, through experiences with other organizations, I’ve found that I am able to take up that much space. And I also do bring a lot to the table when it comes to experience and other things.
So that can be challenging sometimes, but I feel like with the number of women who are becoming a part of agriculture that is becoming less and less common because there are more of us in these spaces. There is more diversity in general in Pennsylvania’s farming spaces. And that’s a beautiful thing because the more diverse we are the more ideas, the more strength we have in general.
And so that idea pot is just becoming more full and more community-based in general, I think.
Hannah Kinney Smith: I would say the same. Ten years ago I was serving as Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary for agriculture. There were many, many times when I was the only woman in the room for sure. And I would say that that has shifted.
I heard that over 50% of the people working for the Department of Agriculture in Pennsylvania are women at this point. So that’s really important to have women farmers have agriculture represent them and for them to see themselves in the Department Of Agriculture.
Julie Grant: You’ve described some different sort of philosophies or ways of thinking about doing things. And so, you know, when you’re not the dominant group, do they take you seriously, like when you say, ‘Hey, maybe we should listen to the animals,’ kind of thing?
Hannah Kinney Smith: Yeah, I would say that Deanne’s neighbors need only look at her land, look at her pastures, look at her animals in terms of the health of the animals, the protection of the water, the ability of her pastures to absorb these deluges of rain that we get that perhaps some of her neighbors don’t have that same infrastructure.
It’s really just because we’re out there doing the work and proving that the way we do things does help us weather a lot of what we’re facing and people do pay attention.
Julie Grant: Is there anything else you want to mention about women farmers in Pennsylvania?
Hannah Kinney Smith: I think that Pennsylvania being number one in the nation for the number of farmers under age 35 also has a role here. It’s the younger farmers, it’s the next generation of farmers, who have grown up in environments where girls are told they can do anything a boy can do and they grow up into women to prove that. Also just the promise of the next generation, because some states just don’t have that degree of young farmers coming up in farming and so Pennsylvania’s awesome.
Deanne Weber: Yeah, we’re lucky. I think that a lot of credit to that needs to go to Pasa though, because Pasa has been very influential in establishing a basis and a place for young farmers to come and learn and build those skills and strategies for starting farms from scratch, because land access is a huge issue, not for me, but for a lot other farmers. And so Pasa providing those educational foundations has just been tremendous.
Julie Grant: Do we know how many in the younger group coming up, what percentage is women farmers?
Hannah Kinney Smith: Yeah, the percentage of women in agriculture is growing in the majority of states across the nation, certainly in Pennsylvania. I think some of it also is when it comes to the [USDA] Ag Census. A lot of the census used to sort of capture only that there is a male farmer present on the farm, whereas we know that women have been doing the books and the marketing and the animal care and a lot of things on the farm that just weren’t counted. And so the changes in the ag census have really helped with recognizing the degree to which women are running farms. They just were never acknowledged before.
In addition to farmers like Deanne and myself increasingly it is women running the farm. We know that like 70% of farmers actually work off farm as I do, but I think increasingly it’s the woman working on the farm and if there is a man in their life, they are perhaps working off farm. So I think those three elements together are really creating a future agricultural environment here in Pasa that increasingly women farmers play a really important role.
