Agriculture and Social Work Practice

I would like to pull together two prior blog posts, Single Women’s Land Rights in India and Buying Cheep Land for Foreign Greed, with some insight and information on the role of agriculture in social work practice. This post will be focused on sustainable development and my own agricultural background in my rural hometown in the United States. I also will be drawing in different personal stories, experiences and interests about rural life, agriculture and market women. We will travel from my home town, to Grenada and then Ghana.

Rural peoples connection with the land is often vital to survival whether subsistence farming, using machines to harvest large monocrops, or to raise livestock to sell and/or eat. In my home town, as the rivers, creeks, slough and streams meander through the valley, they are surrounded by either pastoral land for cattle or agricultural land for farming. The main crops grown in Scott Valley are alfalfa and grass. As my family moved around various locations throughout the valley, during my childhood, the house we lived in for about 10 years was a historical landmark called the Meamber School house. It was a one room school house built in 1879, which was re-modeled into a 2 bed, 2 bath house. Our house was part of a ranch called The Pastures of Heaven. The view from my house was mountains, alfalfa fields, the Scott River and pasture land. My immediate yard was full of voluminous flowers, green grass, and a large garden. If you entered our garden you would have seen a patch of strawberries, rows of corn, lettuce, carrots, mounds of yellow crook neck squash and cucumbers, and small cherry tomato's next to the larger mouth watering deep red ones. In the front of our property we had potato's and winter squash covering the ground. I always joke with my mom about how weeding and gardening used to be a continual chore for my brother and I, but today, I love working in the soil, and long for a climate and land to plant an enormous garden. While gardening was a passion of my moms, it was also a necessity to help support us through the summer months and into the winter. From junior high through high school, my job was also taking care of a private flower garden that was often used for local weddings throughout the summer months, located on the Nasas Ranch. It seemed, for years, all I did during the spring into the fall was gardening.

Our community survived on farming. Most teen boys moved hand and/or wheel lines before and after school. Families ran farms, tilling the soil in the fall or early spring, planting, cutting hay, and bailing from late in the night into the early morning. Many people’s lives revolved around the seasons and agriculture. While my farming and agricultural experience are very different from peoples around the world, there are also similarities in this remarkable tie to the land.

Know wonder why, the first time I went abroad my draw was to the market. The first time I left the United States was on an Anthropological fields study program through Humboldt State to Grenada, in the West Indies. Our assignment was to do an ethnography. My ethnography was around market women including such things as: how far they traveled to reach the market, how often they came, were they themselves farmers or were they middle women selling others food crops, what food crops were they selling etc. Markets are full of life, while seeming often hectic to outsiders, markets are thriving spots for local economies, business deals, and socialization. Markets are normally held on particular day or a couple times a week. It is an amazing site to see the transformation of market areas from one day to the next.

When I first lived in Ghana for 6 months, I was attending the University of Legon, which is in the outskirts of Accra, the capital city. I remember telling my mom through a delayed phone conversation, while in Accra, that the city wasn’t so bad because it was a combination of urban and rural. People were friendly, and there were dirt roads, not just concrete masses, there were chickens, goats and the random pig around the neighborhood, which all made me feel comfortable in the unknown city-bombarding me with millions of people, the hustle and bustle, and taxis and tro-tros zooming here and there. I was supposed to be living in the hostels (dorms), but I couldn't handle it, not being able to cook my own food and not having my own place. So, I moved in with a Korean man, Nigerian man, and some Ghanaians in a house not too far from the college. I created a small area to grow some veggies (I left before they could mature). When I was not in school, I spent a lot of time visiting the local market in Madina. The market was a great place to practice my language skills, meet people and learn about life. I became familiar to a few women who sold daily at the market, knowing I would always buy from them they welcomed conversation and insight. Many women, especially in rural areas, travel long distances by walking or on public transport to make it to the market to sell their food or merchandise.

Agriculture is an essential part of rural life in many parts of the world; I have seen it in my home town in California, Grenada, and Ghana. Schobert and Barron (2004) provide information on the role of social work practice in sustainable agricultural development. According to Schobert and Barron (2004), sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p. 182). Social workers, especially in rural areas, could be involved in sustainable development programs internationally or domestically. Social work skills like joining, networking, assessing, educating, organizing and advocating are important to development work.


Sustainable development programs span many areas of development from rural and urban community development, financial development, environmental development, and agricultural development. The authors describe David Brown’s 4 dimensions of sustainable development: ecological, economic, political, and cultural (182). They present a framework, based on these four dimensions, for practicing sustainable development which includes: joining strategies, education and consciousness-raising, empowerment, community organizing, and collective action (p 183-184). Schobert and Barron (2004) believe that there is a role for social workers in sustainable agriculture throughout the world. They substantiate their argument by using National Association of Social Workers policy statements regarding rural social work, community development and environmental policy.

I see the interdependence with the land and rural people’s way of life; therefore, social work practice is about agriculture, as it is about all areas of life, nothing is separate here. Land provides food, land provides roots, land provides safety and security, and often land is tied to ancestral and spiritual life. Schobert and Barron (2004) provide information on sustainable development models they believe will help meet the needs of people presently and into the future. My prior blogs discussed the significance of land and agriculture to the Africans whose land is being grabbed by foreign governments, and the single women’s struggle to secure land for farming in Northern India. Both of these blogs and my stories here show how land and its life sustaining attributes are vital to people’s well-being.

Schobert, M., & Barron, D. (2004). Community development in an international setting: The role of sustainable agriculture in social work practice (178-191). Scales, L., & Streeter, C. (Eds.). Rural social work: Building and sustaining community assets. Belmont, Ca: Thomson Learning, Inc.

Single Women's Land Rights in India

As I have been looking into land rights, for a prior blog posting, I saw a flier on campus announcing a talk, by Kim Berry, a Professor at Humboldt State University, called Disowning dependence: Single women's collective struggles for land rights in Northwestern India. So last Thursday night, I spent an hour and a half listening to this energetic women discussing her passion. I loved feeling her passion infuse me, but I also felt overwhelmed by the strong feminist language and push. This is a rundown of the talk.

Berry (2010) began research in India in 1992. She began getting involved and doing research with single women in Northwestern India. Her talk was about Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan (ENSS): The Association of Empowered Women is made up of single women in Northwestern India. Single women were described as women who are widowed, divorced, abandoned, abused, or lesbians (i.e. outside marriage). In 2007, ENSS was made up of 6000 single dues-paying women. Berry started her talk by describing the bad/good women dichotomy, where good women were portrayed as women who were bowing their head sweeping the flours, and bad women stood tall in a defiant pose. She described how single women's identity is always positioned as bad women. Being dependent on men symbolically represents a good woman. These single women are always watched, talked about and blamed.

In 2008, 2700 single women came together to embark on a 3 day march to the capital in Himachal Pradesh to demand land rights and other benefits.

• free health care (including free tests, procedures, and medication) for single women;
  
• reservation of peripheral jobs in the public sector for single women;


• ration cards for those single women who are separated from their husbands;
  

• increased pension;

• de jure land rights for tribal women, for farming.
  

• long term lease rights to state land for poor single women.

List of rights and benefits taken from, a blog created by Berry's mother to supporting the single women, http://www.afamilyofonesown.blogspot.com/

The benefits other than the land rights were granted. Today, the government has not granted land rights to single women. ENSS is trying to raise money to buy 10 aces of land, which would be divided into 2 acre plots. A new kind of family called a homosocial household would take care of the land, designated 2 acre plots. The homosocial family would consist of an elder single woman and a young single woman and her children. They created this system because a single woman is unable to meet all the needs of substance farming, childcare, cooking, cleaning etc. alone. Having two women divide up the work and responsibilities will enable the single women to survive. The single women are doing this pilot project to show the government that the women would benefit from land rights and become self-sufficient. Berry (2010) pointed out that the single women's movement and the homosocial household will/are causing people to rethink marriage, kinship, gender relations, and land rights.

This is a great example of grass-roots, bottom-up fight for rights. These women, who are marginalized in their society, organized their community to change the very system that marginalizes them.

If interested to support these women visit the blog listed above.

Berry, K. (2010). Disowning dependence: single women's collective struggles for land rights in Northern India. Presentation at Humboldt State University.