A New Crop of Farmers

Julie Stinar once worked with some of the top names in fashion: Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Tracy Reese.

Now she works with some completely different brand names: Cornish and Poulet Rouge chickens and Red Devon cattle.

Stinar is the owner of Evensong Farm in Sharpsburg, Md., and an example of the changing face of American farming.

Women always played important roles on the family farm. They kept the books, milked the cows and fed the children, often juggling another part-time job while the men worked the fields. Sometimes, they ran the farm after their husbands or fathers died.

But increasingly, women such as Stinar are turning to farming on their own. According to the 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture released this year, more than one in every 10 U.S. farms is run by a woman. In Maryland, the number of farms in which a woman is the principal operator jumped 16 percent between 2002 and 2007. In Virginia, female-run farms also grew by 16 percent.

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