The 20-acre Pembrooke Farm, located along forested Onyx Cave Road in north-central Carroll County, was established in 2021. Brooke Eddy and her spouse, Penny Pemberton, lead us to their tidy produce field and livestock pasture this steamy afternoon behind the couple's white brick home. Eddy, who's tall, strong and tan with sun-bleached blond hair tied in a top knot, is a self-taught farmer. This season she's cultivating a quarter acre of rough Ozark ground.
"We grow flowers and vegetables and livestock," Eddy said. "We have chickens and some goats and will be raising quite a few baby goats this fall."
Penny Pemberton has a bachelor’s degree in animal science and was raised on a cattle farm in northern Boone County.
"So I was wanting to really get back to farming," Pemberton said, "where we can have beef cattle and more honey bees, so I'm very excited about all of that."
Eddy said the farm this summer has produced a bumper crop of sweet juicy tomatoes as well as cucumbers, hot peppers, potatoes, onions, radishes, beets, watermelon, cantaloupes, pumpkins and 16 rows of flowers, which she markets online to a growing number of patrons.
"Right now, we sell everything from our property here," she said. "We really don't venture outside of flower subscriptions that we have solely been pushing through Facebook and social media. So we know mostly word of mouth pushed our sales this season. We haven't really had to venture away from home, which has been very nice," she said.
Pembrooke Farm is self-serve, where patrons can select items from an antique truck bed next to the house, ornately refurbished as a produce cart.
"People come and shop at their convenience, pick up what vegetables and fruits they want from either the cart or the bright yellow fridge," she said, gesturing toward the front porch. "They drop their money in the red cash box on the cart or scan a little Venmo and send the payment electronically."
The role of women on Arkansas farms first expanded in the 1980s, one study shows, to include more decision-making and hands-on participation. Today, U.S. Census data shows over 26,000 women in Arkansas operate both small and large-scale farms growing everything from row crops, grains, dry beans, rice, livestock as well as hay to feed cattle/calf operations. Nationwide USDA data reveals that 43% of American farms are now operated by women, evidenced in northwest Arkansas by the rise of many local female market farmers.
"Today I have zinnias, celosia, marigolds and fresh greenery," said Judy Kavan, who operates The Ugly Bunny Garden in Carroll County. She's also among the first female market farmers in northwest Arkansas, selling produce and plants since 1997, including at Fayetteville Farmers Market, where we spoke with her on a recent early Saturday morning.
"I mean, we've always farmed, really," Kavan said, referring to women farmers. "We've always grown things, you know, whether it's vegetables or animals or babies. We've always grown."
Kayla Lindsey has operated Rocky Comfort Natural Farm for 13 years with the help of her family located in Crosses in rural Madison County.
"It's very important for women to have a foothold in this career that's, you know, often seen as a masculine job," Lindsey said. "And that's just not at all the case. Women are some of the hardest workers I've ever met."
To prove her point, Lindsey also serves as market manager for Fayetteville Farmers Market.
"All of the staff here at the market right now is female," she said. "And we're very close to being equal male and female on our board of directors too, so we really do have a very feminine energy at the farmers market. If you look around a lot of the farmers are female here."
Nena Yang is a board member of the Fayetteville Farmers Market. She grows eight acres of produce and flowers on Rainbow Farm in Siloam Springs, a tradition she learned from her parents, who are Hmong from Laos.
"For me, the flowers make me happy," Yang said. "Produce keeps me happy. It's good. Mainly I do this so I can be in charge of what my family eats."
Marquita Den Herder owns DH Farm in West Fork, where she and her family grow fruits, vegetables, pastured pork and chicken.
"Family farms are really important," Den Herder said. "They are becoming smaller and smaller as cities grow and farmland is being absorbed. It's a little harder to establish yourself as a family farm with a lot of the commercial farming out there because commercial farms can do things cheaper than we can."
Den Herder was encouraged to learn that more women across the country are farming, which has long been considered a male-centered industry. She said her offspring will inherit DH Farm. Her daughter Julia Den Herder serves as outreach manager for the Fayetteville Farmers Market.
"Women are just good connectors," Julia Den Herder said. "They love to connect with community, they love to connect with other farmers and so they just bring an air of community to the market that is so special and valuable."
Sarah Pollard is a valued member of Northwest Arkansas' female farming community. She's the founder of Mountain Greenery in Winslow and first managed the Fayetteville Farmers Market back in the 1990s. She's been farming for nearly 40 years and selling produce and herb plants at the market for 36 years. Pollard has degrees in agronomy and horticulture and is a legacy Ozarks female farmer who's encouraged many young women to take up farming.
"I'm just glad because when I got started, it was definitely a unique thing to have a woman in the farming industry, but I found all my male clients were fine with it and their wives were even better about it," Pollard said. "I think people in the community don't realize what a great group of small-scale sustainable farmers we have here in Arkansas. I just wish people would promote it a little bit more and buy local."
A farming student scrubs fresh-picked carrots in stainless steel sinks this morning inside a produce processing shed, harvested from fields on the University of Arkansas - Fayetteville Agricultural Research Station's
Center for Arkansas Farms and Food— CAFF for short. CAFF offers farmer training, a farm school program, an apprenticeship program, short courses, networking events and lots of activities to support farmer development. CAFF Director Heather Friedrich said she's farm raised.
"I grew up on a farm in Iowa," she said. "It's a dairy farm and my family, they're still farming. We grow a lot of corn, soybean, oats, barley, alfalfa but I spent many, many, many years in the barn and in the hay fields."
That passion for farming spurred Friedrich to obtain a Master's Degree from Iowa State University, where she studied organic horticulture and focused on fruit and vegetable production. Traditionally, farming has been male-centered, she said, with wives and daughters providing critical labor and household support. But she's witnessed a surge of interest by women, especially in sustainable agriculture.
"Yeah, more women are coming in wanting to learn how to farm, be farm business women and have supporting roles in the food system as well."
Friedrich said a growing number of female students at the University of Arkansas and farmer trainees enrolled in CAFF are especially interested in learning market produce production.
"I see women also having a strong interest in livestock production as well," she said. "We've had interns that are also working with the National Cattlemen's Association."
And northwest Arkansas women farmers are increasingly culturally diverse, she said.
"I don't have any hard data, but we see Hispanic women farmers, we see those of Asian descent, we see Marshallese women farmers," she said. "Our first Marshallese person came through a program last year and she's growing for her community and doing an amazing job, so yeah the diversity is pretty broad."
As for obstacles women face in farming, Friedrich said it's similar to male beginner farmers. "Who are not part of these like generational farms, securing access to land, access to capital, you know, I think especially industrial row crop farming. There's a lot of barriers and pressures that those farmers face, like gaining access to credit so that they can make investments in equipment and their operations."
Friedrich said she also suspects that women may face challenges working with federal agricultural institutions, where they may have to prove themselves compared to men. But institutions like the Center for Arkansas Farms and Food provide women with plenty of fertile resources.
"I mean we do see a really strong segment of women that are, you know, participating in our classes, our online classes, our in-person short courses and in our farm school and apprenticeship programs."
The CAFF Farm School application portal is now open through Sept. 30 for new farmer applicants. Cailin Irby is CAFF's farm school manager, also training University of Arkansas farm interns and field assistants in professional development. She's a 2021 undergraduate in horticulture from the University of Arkansas, now pursuing a master’s degree in public health. She worked for a large-scale commercial farm prior to her current position, so she understands the ropes.
"So the farm school is a 10-month program from February to November," she said. "Students spend 16 hours a week here at farm school, two of the days are spent in the classroom learning business and horticultural production concepts, and then the other two days, students are in the field gaining hands-on experience."
Irby has observed some differences between female farming learners and male farming learners.
"Female learners are very interested in the perspectives of growing, while male learners might be interested in more of the perspectives of equipment use but they both kind of overlap in different ways. Every single person is different and has their strong suits."
Female students, Irby said, quickly realize that it takes grit to operate any sort of farm, traditionally tooled for men.
"The fact that vegetable production is really hard work and it takes a certain amount of strength and a certain amount of fortitude and tenacity, that's easier for like the big macho man," she said, "because we have a lot of tools and things that were designed for [male] strength and height. But I really try to make a point of saying that you can design your farm to fit your body and your needs."
Evidenced by a growing number of northwest Arkansas women farmers, who shine as highly productive market farmers. A perfect fit.
To learn more about Fayetteville Farmers Market women vendors featured in our story, search here.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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