Culver's replaces its bacon with a new, thick-cut variety

The feminist farmer: On her own land, she aims to challenge farming's gender roles

Laura Schulte
Wausau Daily Herald

ATHENS - When her children were babies, Kat Becker would drive the transplanting equipment across farm fields, planting seeds and nursing her infant in the crook of her arm at the same time. 

As the lead vegetable farmer of Stoney Acres Farm for nearly 12 years, she multitasked, trying to work full time both as a mother and tender of the crops. Hers was a small-scale, organic farm. She took pride in its self-sufficiency, but that also meant she felt pressure to do it all. 

It took a toll on her.

Owner Kat Becker checks on plants in one of her caterpillar greenhouses Tuesday, May 15, 2018, at her farm in Athens, Wisc. T'xer Zhon Kha/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Becker left Stoney Acres after her divorce a year ago, and is now the owner of Cattail Organics, a new organic vegetable farm in Athens. She says she is taking new steps to care for herself and her family. Now with her new farm, she's hoping to plow a new path.

Having studied and worked in the realm of farming for nearly 20 years, Becker has seen the sexism built into the structure of the profession, from legal frameworks that don't allow for the possibility that a couple would be co-farmers to the crushing cultural expectations placed on a farmer's wife. Today, she's set out to create a more welcoming and supportive community for women in the agricultural world. With those values in mind, Becker now calls herself a feminist farmer, and hopes she'll be able to help other women through similar problems. 

New Yorker turned farmer

Becker's interest in farming started young. She grew up in Manhattan, and while she wasn't attending high school classes, she worked delivering meals to those in need of food. 

After high school, she chose to go to college at Cornell University in upstate New York, where she spent time volunteering in community gardens when she wasn't in class, learning about seeds and the politics that surround them. She graduated in 2003, and headed to Wisconsin to get deeper into agriculture. 

She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in the fall of 2003, studying seeds. There she worked for Vermont Valley farm while she pursued her master's degree studying seed politics. While working at Vermont Valley, she learned about community-sourced agriculture, which became something of a passion for her. 

"I was trained to farm on CSA and loved the connection to people and the built in commitment to biodiversity and education," she said. 

It was in Madison that Becker met Tony Schultz, a farmer from central Wisconsin who had grown up on his family's dairy farm. 

She graduated in the spring of 2006, and moved with Schultz back to his family's farm in Athens, where they went on to marry and start a family and a farm, using her knowledge of vegetable farming and his knowledge of animals. While they worked to get their farm established, Schultz taught at Newman Catholic High School for a year and Becker taught classes at the UW Marathon County. Meanwhile, the couple had three children: two boys and a girl. 

"I taught part-time for seven years, even though I was farming full time and had three children," she said. With irony, she added, "because that's reasonable."

Kat Becker holds 10 week old Riley Schultz-Becker as she waters organic plants in one of the greenhouses at Stoney Acres Farm in rural Athens in 2008.

And that's when some of her understanding of the challenges of farming as a woman began to take root. She's always identified as a feminist, and her life experience strengthened those convictions. 

"The definition I use is that women are people. It's not a joke. I think that in all senses of the word, women have the capacity to do things on their own," she said. 

Still, the work could be overwhelming at times. Becker was tending to vegetable fields, caring for children, tending to the house, cooking, cleaning and keeping track of the books. She felt her work wasn't recognized as often or as widely as her husband's was, both by farming agencies and customers who bought their products. She felt the weight of expectations that pushed Becker to her limits, both physically and mentally.

It wasn't all the result of farming. Becker had seen her mother do some of the same things. But the idea that she should be all things at once was also tied into her own notions of living and working on a small, sustainable organic farm. It was meant to be a self-sufficient unit. If there were problems, maybe she just wasn't working hard enough. 

"In sustainable agriculture, it's even more entrenched," she said, "that you can work full time with a literal baby strapped to your back and be totally sleep deprived and do it all really well," she said. 

Stacey Botsford of Red Door Family Farm, a neighbor and friend of Becker's, felt the same pressures. Her children are 2 and 5 years old, and when she and her husband first started farming, they were relying on family members to help out with child care when the kids weren't on the farm with them. 

"There's this idea that the reason you have a farm is so you can raise your kids on the farm," she said. 

But then Botsford's mother brought something to her attention she hadn't thought of before. Did anyone she knew, her mom asked her, take their children to a factory job for 13 hours a day? Of course not, she said. 

"I stopped treating farming as a hobby and started treating it as a profession," she said. 

For Becker, the fact that her marriage wasn't doing well added to her worries over childcare and balancing motherhood with farming. In 2016 she decided to leave the marriage — which meant leaving Stoney Acres.

It was a difficult process. She had to hand over projects that she'd worked on for years, like a 10,000 member Facebook page for Stoney Acres, and a farm she'd poured her heart into. A good amount of her equity was invested in the farm, and with few legal protections in case of farm divorces, the process took time.

"You don't fight for (everything), because you don't want to fight anymore," she said. 

A new chapter

Becker moved about a mile down the road, into a home that her mother lived in since following Becker from New York City to north central Wisconsin in 2013. In 2017, she started a farm on that property, where she now spends hours every day, tending to her acres of vegetables. At the back portion of the farm are fields of potato plants. There's a field of flowers. Then there are several hoop houses, which protect plants from bugs and elements while keeping them warm, full of lettuces. At the front of her property, she has greenhouses, where all the plants on her farm originally start, before they're put into the ground elsewhere.

At any given time, her labrador can be seen romping through the fields, asking for workers to stop and pat his belly along the way.

On about 15 acres, it was a great spot to continue her dream of sustainable agriculture. This time would be different.

Owner Kat Becker waters her vegetable plants in one of her greenhouses Tuesday, May 15, 201, at her farm in Athens, Wisc. T'xer Zhon Kha/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

That farm, now in its second year, is Cattail Organics, a certified organic farm that produces vegetables for wholesale, and for CSA members throughout spring, summer and fall. In some ways, Cattail Organics is new, but in others it's a continuation of the work that she'd been doing for 12 years at Stoney Acres. 

"I got to make decisions about a lot of things, like how soil is managed, how animals will be cared for," she said. "I feel like I took all of my knowledge and I got to bring it." 

On her new farm, Becker is focused on growing high-quality food for the community, and growing what her buyers want. She purposely keeps her CSA small — about 50 members — so she can provide the produce that her buyers want to cook with and eat. 

And with her new farm, Becker is creating a new set of rules for herself, meant to keep her family and herself happy and healthy. One of the big parts of that is, for the first time in her life, using child care. Her three children, who are 10, 7 and 4, get care when not in school. Her youngest attends daycare in Athens, while the older two are cared for at home by a sitter. She also splits parenting duties with Schultz. 

"They may not eat all organic food or be playing in a pond all day, but you know that those days of the week, they're taken care of, they're safe and they're happy," she said. "I am a better mother when they get home because I haven't been putting them off or multitasking all day long." 

Becker and Botsford now share child care, giving each other's children rides to Athens and sharing sitters if needed, which makes being a full-time farmer and mother a little more viable. 

And when Becker's children get home from school or child care at the end of the day, it allows Becker to put down her tools and separate her work from her family. 

"I may have to get up and check the greenhouse or turn something off," she said. "But I'm not trying to attempt to get real farm work done with small children around." 

Now that Becker has seen just how devastating a divorce can be for a family farm, she's hoping to help other women, by encouraging couples farming together to use legal structures to protect themselves and their interests. 

"This is a discussion starting to happen in sustainable agriculture that's never happened before," she said. "Talking about how to set up legal structures if you're going to enter into business with somebody you're married to." 

It's something that she's even employing in her own life. She's dating — and co-farming with — someone new. But the business and the relationship are separate. Becker owns the land and collects a portion of the profit, and the two sell to different accounts. 

Looking forward to a future of women farmers

At Cattail Organics, Becker tends to the fields and houses daily, and now feels that her daily labor is more recognized than ever before. And she's not the only woman that's getting more notice when it comes to work on the farm. 

Becker said that though it's taken a long time, women are finally started to be recognized for the work that they put in. More women are being listed as farm operatives than ever by the United States Department of Agriculture, and social media is helping to show that work off, Becker said. According to the USDA, there are currently over 969,000 women farmers recognized by the organization, with over 33,000 of those women based in Wisconsin, according to the 2012 census data. 

And as farming becomes a more viable career for women, Becker hopes to see a generation of female farmers that aren't only tending to their gardens and animals, but balancing all the aspects of their lives in a healthy way. 

"Yes, you're going to be on your hands and knees weeding carrots sometimes," she said. "But the idea that you're overtired, overextended and that's just how life is on the farm, especially for women — that's something that needs to be challenged."