Growing in influence

A new generation of female farmers, managers and agricultural experts are sowing the seeds of change in this traditionally male-dominated industry

- Written by Gabriel Stone

EVER SINCE ancient Greek farmers entreated their goddess Demeter for a hand with harvest, there has been recognition that women play a vital role in agriculture.

Yet while necessity gave women farming jobs long before today's rich spectrum of career paths opened up to them, their roles tended to be menial rather than managerial. Thomas Hardy's heroine Bathsheba Everdene may be fictional but the obstructive chauvinism she faces as a rare female farm owner would have rung true among readers long after the 1874 publication of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Then, within living memory, came the 'Land Girls' who did so much to keep this country fed during the two world wars. First formed in 1917, the Women's Land Army (WLA) recruited 23,000 female workers to replace the men who had gone off to fight. This opportunity to prove themselves in traditionally male positions helped change society's attitudes to such an extent that in 1918 women - well, some of them at least - were at last given the vote. With the 1939 outbreak of the Second World War, the WLA reformed under the command of Lady Gertrude Denman, who declared: "It is in the fields of Britain that the most critical battle of the present war may well be fought and won."

At its 1944 peak more than 80,000 Land Girls were helping to produce 70% of the nation's food. Yet it was only in 1943 that the Land Girls' Charter brought their minimum wage more closely into line, if still far from parallel, with average farm pay. Once again, though, these female farm workers seized the chance to dismantle gender stereotypes. Land Girls operated the heavy machinery required to drain thousands of acres of East Anglian fenland for food production. Around 6,000 others worked as 'Lumber Jills' in the Women's Timber Corps, while two Land Girls notched up an impressive tally of 12,000 rats killed between them in a single year.