USDA settlement: It's about time

The plain-but-pretty farm wife stands in front of what must be 100 Mason jars.

She wipes the sweat from her forehead with her flour-sack apron and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She looks out the window, wondering how the men are faring in the field ...

It's awfully irritating when Hollywood acts as if rural America is stuck in some kind of time warp - a sepia-toned past that never quite was - but you can kind of understand it, at least.

After all, how would people who've never lived in the country's vast middle know what modern farm life is like?

But the news this week that the Farm Service Agency discriminated against thousands of women farmers who applied for U.S. Department of Agriculture loans, well that just makes me mad.

If I asked the average American to draw me a farmer, they'd probably sketch out a lanky, white, middle-aged man who'd wear his Key Imperials to church if he thought he would get away with it. And yes, there are plenty of those guys around.

But it's not the whole picture, and the FSA should know that. It's their business.

The good news is Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack is expected to offer $1.33 billion to settle discrimination claims by women and Hispanic farmers who say the FSA denied, delayed or reduced their loans, even though they qualified for them.

The bad news is that it's 2010 and the agency's just now getting around to righting that wrong - too late for farmers like JoAnne Neuzil, 75, who lost her family farm in Riverside in 2004 after the FSA refused to give her a loan. Too late for thousands of others like her.

According to the most recent USDA Census, nearly one third of the country's farmers are women - up from 5.2 percent in 1978 (here in Iowa, one farm in 10 is owned and operated by a woman).

Their numbers have been growing at a much higher rate than farmers overall - a 19 percent increase since 2002.

Women are the principal operators of 14 percent of the nation's 2.2 million farms.

Used to be, those women who were principal operators took over when they inherited the family business. Increasingly, they're choosing the career. They're literally changing the face of farming.

Women farmers tend to run smaller operations - nearly 70 percent have fewer than 140 acres. They are more likely to raise livestock or high-value crops.

Still, sometimes they need loans - just like everybody else.

And the Farm Service Agency should have known that all along.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@thegazette.com