Meet Four Successful Local Women Farmers

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Culture

Insights & Perspectives: An Interview

Rita Calvert: Working with farmers over these last several years has introduced me to enormous changes in today’s farming world. It seems the pace of change is explosive. All of you have moved far beyond the conventional farming methods. What do you think? 

Jena Paice: Women who are farming are strong and resilient and it takes a strong person to stick with it. I’ve had the background to quickly rise to manage a flourishing organic farm where “organic” wasn’t even a label 100 years ago. 

Martha Clark: I look, in particular, at my great grandmother, Martha Tyson Smith Hopkins, for whom I was named. She was farming from 1893 to 1915 and did very well at it. I have a diary of her first year of farming that is fascinating. Yes, a lot has changed. 

Nora and I farm together, so it is nice to have each other to discuss plans and make decisions together. We also work closely with our farm manager, George Klopf, and he brings strong farming experience, skills, and expertise to our operation. I think there is still a small residual sense on the part of some farmers and vendors that women are not as good at farming as men, but that is really the exception now, rather than wide-spread.    

Kim Wagner: Well, I can’t imagine the struggles 100 years ago. I can say it was not easy because it is a challenge today even with advanced equipment and new technology.

Paice: It is my absolute and unyielding belief that everyone should have access to fresh, organic food—and have knowledge about its origin.

For the last 20 years, I’ve had the good fortune to learn and practice the art and science of organic farming. From a career as a master gardener on a private estate to managing a local certified organic farm, I have learned the skills of vegetable and fruit production as well as animal husbandry.

Nora Crist: I think the local food movement has opened a lot of doors for women farmers to get started. Being face to face with customers helps people learn and accept that anyone can grow food. This helps dispel the stigma that all farmers are men and it shows other women that they can do it too. 

Wagner: There was a huge learning curve, but I was determined to do things differently based on what I now know about health through my recovery. For example: sprouting grains for animal feed, making large batches of probiotics for animal health, slower grow out times, convincing processors to work with me and understand my product would be different with my animals being given optimally nutritious food. Also, I believe in maintaining an environment so the pigs could live as natural a life as possible. I guess my methods are very old fashioned, primitive, certainly not resembling any production facility today.

Calvert: I’m hearing about a lot of courage, resilience, and positive thinking. You all seem to have those attributes. Talk about the challenges you have had to overcome to farm your way.

Clark: There have been times when I have felt not taken seriously. Generally, I don’t mind being underestimated, but occasionally that can be frustrating. In our local community and overall, I have felt supported and not singled out for being a woman. I am also lucky to have a great group of local women farmers to support me. 

At times, in larger groups or when away from home, there is a sense of differentiation between male and female farmers, but I have been lucky to not see that too dramatically. I find that once we start talking about our farms, any barriers fall away because we realize we speak the same language.

Paice: The dictum I live by and have taught my daughters is, «Work hard and put your mind to it!” However, one of my biggest challenges came from male farmers who belittled the “organic” practices of my woman-owned farm. Now, those conventional farmers see I have worked very hard and still am in business, plus they know I grow excellent produce with even a signature pie [pizza] at Ava’s in Easton.

Land access is the biggest dilemma I face, like most sustainable farmers in our region. The price of land is way too high for the margins that small sustainable farmers can earn. This is not a problem just for women farmers, but all small farmers.

Initially, I had roadblocks to acquiring loans but I didn’t give up. I pushed hard by continually pursuing these loans and learned to speak the business language.

Women have always known how to take care of family, children, and the garden, showing resilience just in their innate qualities. Farming can be an extension of their innate nurturing qualities, so they excel at it. For me, it was about feeding my three incredible daughters, one of which works at the farm and farmers’ market with me.

Wagner: For me, it was more being a new kid on the block, proving I was serious—that there was value in what I was doing, that my ideas and methods were in line with consumer desire and they would be willing to pay for that product. Today, I still have relationships with these customers. I believe there is a mutual respect that I had to earn. There has been much change in small scale farming. Women have a strong presence. I am proud to stand with them, proud to be a small part of the local sustainable food movement. The struggles are real, we all share them. 

My path was filled with resistance, mostly, to change. Perhaps coming from a life-threatening experience with complications, I was ready for the challenge—everything else seems easy. The farm was my place of healing, communing with the animals, the beauty of the land, wildlife, peace, quiet, and the friends and relationships built there are priceless. Maybe there were struggles, maybe things were tougher because of gender, my practices, being an outsider, whatever. I guess I chose to not see that, and still choose not to. I had a vision.

Meet Kim Wagner of Black Bottom Farm

“The Resilient Lady Farmer”

In 2009, Kim Wagner was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. Driven by her diagnosis, treatment, and frustration with sourcing local nutrient dense, ethically-grown clean food, Wagner began farming. Her health history, nursing background, and passion for honest, local food fostered her unconventional approach to raising livestock sustainably and humanely. 

Learning quickly, she began raising pigs, chickens, turkeys, and veal calves on 50 acres of open range, ponds, and woodlots. Wagner took care to honor the strong social bonds and natural instincts of her animals—recognizing their individual habits and personalities, allowing them to explore, roam, root, and wallow in an idyllic natural Eastern Shore setting. She did so all without using antibiotics, growth stimulants, routine chemical dewormers, or soy products. She is on a mission to provide the most nutrient dense food possible in a way that benefits the animals, the land, consumers, especially cancer patients, and, yes, herself as farmer. In fact, in 2017, she expanded this concept from her farm to the Western shore to help cultivate the next generation of farmers.

Wagner sold the Black Bottom land to The Eastern Shore Land Conservancy and stepped across the bridge to the Western Shore where she started a local farm products home delivery service. She also took her favorite pig sow, “Grandmom milk machine,” with her. Grandmom Rose has a very contented existence.

Meet Jena Paice of Spirit Grower

“Hands in the Dirt, Makes Me Feel Grateful”

As a single mother of three daughters, Jena Paice has always been drawn to the earth and environment. Trained as a landscaper, she grows organic veggies at Spirit Grower in the Bay Hundred area, where she was born, and sells at local restaurants and the St. Michaels Farmers’ Market. She has always had a special relationship with nature and its beauty. 

“For me, growing and farming has always seemed like the most seamless union of career and passion. The garden is a place for healing; to get the anger out as the earth is the biggest healing sanctuary we have.”

In addition to farming, Paice has organized farmers’ markets and CSAs. All these roles ignited a new passion: sharing her organic farming with the community by teaching. A year ago, she founded a youth farming program for surrounding schools.

Meet Martha Clark and Nora Crist of Clark’s Elioak Farm 

“Never Sell the Land”

In the historic heart of Howard County, Martha Clark and her daughter, Nora Crist, are the first two women to completely take over the reins of a long farm lineage—the very active 540 acre Clarks Elioak Farm. Since 1797, the farm had been run by men of the Clark family. 

“Never sell the land” is a credo that keeps the land sustainably preserved while the women cultivate organic vegetables and 100 percent pastured/grassfed beef, pork, lamb, and eggs. Clark also runs an Agritourism venture: the on-site Enchanted Forest, which began welcoming families to the farm in September 2002 as a petting farm and educational venue to celebrate Clark’s and Crist’s love of family farming. 

Since inheriting the core of father Jim Clark’s beef cattle herd, the farmer ladies have changed the entire direction of the farm—from conventional to beyond sustainable, and now the new regenerative agriculture, focused on improving land quality. In 2006, they shifted the cattle to a 100 percent grassfed and finished herd. The first 100 percent grassfed beef, using organic methods, was available during the spring of 2010. 

Crist had her own journey which greatly influenced the farm products. While in college, she experienced severe joint pain, which was diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis and went on treatments of prednisone, over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, and anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). When she tested a diet of overloading on carbs then going cold-turkey, she found gluten was the cause of her disease. She gave up gluten while deciding to eat clean; thus the organic direction for Clark’s Elioak Farm produce.