Well, of course women make great farmers. Why do you think they call it Mother Earth? From babies to baby spinach, it’s all about the nurturing. We’re good at that: keeping crops, or kids, well-fed and watered; making sure our babies are not too hot or cold; protecting them from pests and plagues, and so on.

Is our nurturing nature due to nature or nurture? There’s a question you wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole, unless, of course, you want to be a lightening rod à la Larry Summers [1]. And what about bad apples like Susan Smith [2] or Andrea Yates [3]? Anomalies, I’m sure; on the whole, we women are good at making things grow.

So it’s no wonder the number of women taking up the till is up significantly in recent years. According to a recent NPR story [4], women now run one in every ten American farms. In Florida alone, the number of farms headed by women [5] jumped 67% from 1992 to 2002.

What’s especially encouraging about this trend is the fact that women farmers often opt to grow their crops organically. Why? Because it’s not nice to foul Mother Nature.

Image credit: ©1906 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.