In 1971, two years after the National Future Farmers of America (FFA), voted to allow females to be members, Helen Reddy sang the song “I am Woman”. The title of this Footnote contains the first two lines of the song. The chorus to the song includes the words “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman!”
This song could well be the theme song for the rise of women in the FFA and in the world of agriculture.
This Friday Footnote was inspired by a conversation I had two weeks ago with the Texas Area I FFA Officers. I had the privilege of speaking to 900+ FFA members and guest at their annual convention in Canyon, Texas. The night before the convention I had a chat with the Area I officers. Seven of the eight officers were females. Part of our conversation centered on the rise of females in the world of agriculture. I shared some statistics with them. Their advisor, Kevin Meek, asked if I could send him that information which I did. I then thought perhaps other agriculture teachers would be interested in those statistics. So here they are plus much more.
Figure 1. The Texas Area I 2022-2023 FFA Officers.
A Few Years Ago
I started teaching high school agriculture in the fall of 1969. There were no females in my classes. That fall the national FFA voted to allow females to be in the FFA. So, after the decision to allow females membership in the national FFA, was I then inundated with female students?
No! It takes time for attitudes and perceptions to change. Many agriculture programs continued to operate as normal – that is without females in the FFA. Likewise many school administrators were still of the opinion that girls belonged in home economics classes and guys should be in the shop or agricultural classes. Just like you can’t turn an ocean liner around on a dime, this was the situation in agricultural education and the FFA. It would take years for women to truly gain a foothold in agricultural education and the FFA.
In 1971 Howard Bradley, an agricultural education professor at Kansas State University reported that a female ag ed graduate of Kansas State was having problems finding a teaching position. His article in The Agricultural Education Magazine titled “A Woman Vocational Agriculture Teacher” starts with a question – Is there a place for the female in the field of vocational agriculture teaching? He quoted one school superintendent (Bradley, 1971, p. 33) as saying “…I question whether our community, or other communities in the state of Kansas, is ready to hire a woman vocational agriculture teacher.”
In the 1970s vocational education (including agricultural education) was criticized as being a bastion of sex discrimination. Student enrollment in numerous vocational programs followed distinct lines of sexual stereotyping (Lee and Fitzgerald, 1975). Gillie (1975, p. 35) maintained that “In many places the attitude toward professional women in vocational education remains chauvinistic. The myth that certain occupations are male, and others female, still persists and is likely to for a long time.”
Kievit (1974) stated that teaching vocational agriculture was the most male intensive vocational teaching field in the nation. Osso (1974) of the United States Office of Education reported that less than one percent of vocational agriculture teachers were female in 1972.
Bradley (1971, p. 33) informs us that “One of our western states that has a large teacher education program reported they have not been able to place a woman Agricultural Education major graduate in the vocational agriculture teaching field in the past four years.” Was this just an anomaly?
Jo Ellen Seaman (1975, p. 279) wrote “It is hard to overcome tradition.” She was describing her efforts to find an agricultural education teaching position after graduating from Illinois State University. She states “Finding a teaching job was an experience in itself. Applying for the job was easy. The hardest part was convincing them (school administrators) that I could do the job.”
A survey of vocational directors in Texas in 1974 revealed that 27 percent of the directors had reservations about hiring women to teach vocational agriculture (Brown, 1974). Perhaps the number of vocational directors with reservations about hiring women was actually higher because there were only three female agriculture teachers in Texas in 1974 (Stapper, 1975).
Disturbed by what I was reading in the literature about females having difficulty finding jobs teaching agriculture, a research inquiry was launched to determine if this was really true or just some disgruntled individuals complaining. A female professional colleague and I surveyed 100 female agriculture teachers and 100 male agriculture teachers from across the nation in 1979. The teachers were matched on years of experience, degree held, and geographic location. Forty-three percent of the females surveyed believed they had been discriminated against in finding a teaching position while 9% of the males believed they had been discriminated again. Apparently, the discrimination was real (Moore and Moore, 1980).
Women in agricultural education were not exactly greeted with welcoming arms in the 1970s. So when did the tide turn?
Women in Agriculture Today
A quick Google search today finds the following:
Missouri Farmer Today (March 4, 2023) – Female enrollment in Colleges of Agriculture is 54% at the University of Missouri, 58% at Iowa State, and 55% at the University of Illinois. Bryan Garton, Senior Associate Dean at the University of Missouri stated Animal Science majors were 85% female while agricultural education majors were 78% female. He said it was interesting to see the shift in Missouri from almost all male ag teachers to now having more balance.
Farm World (October 27, 2010) – The growth in college agriculture programs across the country has come from women, according to Bill Richardson, project manager of the USDA’s Food, Agriculture and Education Information System.
CNBC (October 21, 2019) – Since 2007 the number of women-owned firms has grown at five times the national average.
USDA (October 2019) – In 2017, the United States had 1.2 million female farm producers, accounting for 36 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farm producers. Female producers are slightly younger, more likely to be a beginning farmer, and more likely to live on the farm they operate than male producers. More than half of all farms (56 percent) had a female producer. These female-operated farms accounted for 38 percent of U.S. agriculture sales and 43 percent of U.S. farmland.
National FFA Organization (February 15, 2019) – In 1967 there were approximately 3,300 females enrolled in vocational agriculture classes at the high school level. Today “Nearly half of all FFA members are women, and females hold approximately 50% of state leadership positions.”
Figure 2. The 50th Anniversary Logo for Women in FFA.
Based on the information above, it appears the tide has turned! However, we do have substantial empirical data that shows the tide has indeed turned in regard to females in agriculture.
The latest USDA-NIFA study reported that “At the baccalaureate level, female graduates [in agriculture] have comprised the majority of graduates over the past two decades. (Employment Opportunities for College Graduates in Food, Agriculture, Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment, United States, 2020-2025, nd). There has been a steady increase of females in agricultural education and in other agricultural majors for several decades. The “cross-over” year was 2011-2012. For the first time ever, the percentage of female graduates in agriculture in agriculture and natural resource majors at postsecondary institutions exceeded that of males (50.8% to 49.2%). See Table 1.
Table 1. Female Baccalaureate Graduates in Agriculture and Natural Resources
| Year | Percent of Female Graduates |
| 1959-60 | 1.3 |
| 1964-65 | 2.2 |
| 1969-70 | 4.1 |
| 1974-75 | 14.1 |
| 1979-80 | 29.6 |
| 1984-85 | 31.5 |
| 1989-90 | 32.3 |
| 1994-95 | 36.4 |
| 1999-2000 | 43.4 |
| 2004-05 | 48.5 |
| 2009-10 | 49.3 |
| 2014-15 | 52.2 |
| 2019-20 | 57.3 |
Source: National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_325.10.asp
The National Center for Education Statistics reported that 57% of the baccalaureate graduates in agriculture and natural resources at the postsecondary level in 2019-2020 were females. If we broke the data down to majors, it is nearly certain that females in agricultural education would be greater than the 57% figure.
Between 2004 and 2011 female enrollment in undergraduate programs at land-grant colleges in Agricultural Public Services (Agricultural Education, Extension Education, Ag Communications) increased by 11.4 percent while male enrollment decreased by 6.2% (FAEIS News, July 2012). See Figure 3.
Figure 3. Enrollments in Agricultural Public Services majors
If we had data for the years 2012-2022 we could expect the spread between females and males to grow even wider. The U.S. Supply and Demand for Teachers of Agricultural Education, 2014-2015 (Lawver, Foster & Smith, 2018) study found that 65% of license-eligible agricultural education graduates in 2016 were female.
It is interesting when one examines enrollment in specific programs. Here at North Carolina State University (NCSU) 86% of the enrollment in Animal Science is female while 92% of the enrollment in the Vet School is female. Nationally women made up 80% of vet students in 2017-18. According to Travis Park the current demographic data for agricultural education students at NCSU is 83.3 percent female.
In September of 1971 65 women were enrolled in undergraduate programs in the College of Ag at Texas A&M. This spring (2023) 58% of the undergraduate College of Ag students are female (Thanks Dr. Dooley for this data).
Recently I read that 51% of the agriculture teachers in Texas were female. Who would have thought it back in the 1974 when there were only three females teaching agriculture in Texas. This trend is repeating in other states. Some states now have 2/3, if not more, of the agriculture teachers being female.
So indeed the tide has turned.
Concluding Remarks
Helen Reddy’s 1972 song “I am Woman” has certainly proven to be prophetic for agricultural education today.
Elissa Walters, a Virginia agriculture teacher in a guest editorial penned in The Agricultural Education Magazine in June of 1975 stated:
…as agriculture teachers, particularly at the high school level, we must assume responsibility to encourage and help all students, both male and female, in recognizing their potential in agriculture. Over one-half of the population in this country is female – a great untapped resource of hands and minds that is ours to inspire and instruct. Let us make use of this great potential.
It appears we have heeded Elissa’s admonition and need to continue to do so. There is a national shortage of agricultural teachers. We need to encourage all of our students, both male and female, to consider teaching agriculture as a career.
Rejoinder: For the sake of historical accuracy it should be noted after a long, protracted dispute in the 1930s between the national FFA and Rufus Stimson, state agricultural education supervisor in Massachusetts, females were allowed membership in the FFA at the state level but not at the national level. So there were females in the FFA in a few New England states, but this practice was not followed in most states. For more details check out the Friday Footnote for January 18, 2019 – The Massachusetts Situation: The Rest of the Story.
References
Bradley, Howard (1971, August). A Woman Vocational Agriculture Teacher. The Agricultural Education Magazine, Vol. 44, No. 2.
Brown, Herman (1974, August). Opinions of Texas Vocational Directors on Employing Women Vo-Ag Teachers. The Agricultural Education Magazine. Volume 47, No. 2.
Gillie, Angelo C., Jr. (1974, November). Women in Vocational Education: An Introduction. American Vocational Journal. Volume 49, No. 8.
Hightower, Lias (2012, July 4), Study: Undergraduate Women Outnumber Men in Land-Grant Ag Programs. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/07/24/study-undergraduate-women-outnumber-men-land-grant-ag-programs
Kievit, Mary Bach (1974, November). Will Jill Make Department Chair? American Vocational Journal, Volume 49, No. 8.
Lawver, R. G., Foster, D. D., & Smith, A. R. (2018). Status of the U.S. Supply and Demand for Teachers of Agricultural Education, 2014 – 2016.
Lee, Arthur M. & Fitzgerald, (1976). Learning a Living Across the Nation. Vol 5, Part 2 Statistical Almanac (Project Baseline). Northern Arizona University.
Moore, Gary & Moore, Barbara (1980, April). Sex Discrimination in the Teaching of Vocational Agriculture. Paper presented to the American Educational Research Association, Boston.
Osso, Nicholas (1974). United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Vocational Education: Characteristics of Students and Staff 1972. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Seaman, Jo Ellen. (1975, June). Overcoming Prejudices. The Agricultural Education Magazine, Volume 47, No. 12.
Stapper, Mary J. (1975, June). Don’t Exclude Women from Ag Teaching. The Agricultural Education Magazine, Volume 47, No. 12.
United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Employment Opportunities for College Graduates in Food, Agriculture, Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment, United States, 2020-2025. https://www.purdue.edu/usda/employment/
Walters, Elissa (1975, June). Women—The Untapped Resource. The Agricultural Education Magazine. Volume 47. Number 12.