As World Rural Women’s Day approaches on Oct. 15, Canadian farm women are turning from finishing harvest to planting their actions for the next year.
As in farming, however, a lack of income is threatening their seeding plans.
The Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada wants to spend the year educating urban people about the farm income situation.
President Faye Mayberry, of Red Deer, said the FWIC executive will talk about how to do that when it meets in a couple of weeks.
“I have a feeling so many farm women are burnt out that they are not able to grasp the issues and go ahead as we did back in the ’80s during the last farm crisis.”
Read Also

Alberta researcher helps unlock the economics of farming
Lethbridge Polytechnic researcher helping agriculture producers with decision-making tools in economic feasibility
The Canadian Farm Women’s Network has two priorities for the upcoming year: farm women’s legal rights and recognizing unpaid labor on the farm.
President Carolyn Van Dine of Woodstock, N.B., said the network has done some work on legal rights, but it has been unable to get the money to complete it.
The project’s last phase was to be succession planning. While other groups such as the Canadian Farm Business Management Council are developing workshops on family farm transfers, Van Dine said the network would have focused on the women’s perspective.
The subject of unpaid labor is also sitting on the shelf because of a lack of funding.
Van Dine said there has been no action since the issue was reported at the network’s national conference in Saskatoon 11 months ago.
Facts in black and white
Women activists are hoping to get more fuel for their arguments when Statistics Canada reports from the last census on hours put into volunteer work.
“The worst part of projects is they’re done and usually it’s an issue that needs follow-up.”
Neither the federal government nor the Canadian Federation of Agriculture have ongoing funding for farm women’s groups.
“It’s all gone on the shelf and we’re just concentrating on saving our individual farms.”
Women of the National Farmers Union also rely on project funding to explore their issues. Women’s president Shannon Storey of Saskatoon said core funding would enable groups to pay an assistant to continue the work between projects. Writing proposals to get funding takes time away from lobbying, writing briefs and holding workshops. In an organization with scarce resources, it comes down to a “choice between defending the wheat board or doing something for women.”
Storey said gender issues are also hampered by the limited income of farmers and women, who still earn an average 75 cents for each man’s dollar.
No federal support
She has a personal interest in the funding problem.
“We used to get federal dollars for a women’s retreat, but that disappeared in 1994. That meeting became vital to my being active in the NFU.
“You don’t create new leadership simply by sending leaders to meetings. You have to have the rank and file recruited and trained.”
Storey said agricultural meetings tend to be dominated by men because their groups get commodity check-off money to pay expenses.
“Farm women get invited by government, but there’s no money attached to the invitation.”
Storey said farm women are looking for other sources of money, now that federal funding is focused on projects, and the Farm Women’s Bureau is “completely dependent on the goodwill of other divisions of Agriculture Canada.”
For example, while farm women in Quebec have access to some check-off money from that province’s main farm group, most of their funding comes from an annual gala event.
She said groups representing women within the Ontario Farmers Association don’t seem to be “a funding priority for those on the committee, who of course are mainly men.”
In Saskatchewan, the provincial Women’s Secretariat has funneled some money to farm women, mainly for computer training and strategy planning. Some women’s institutes and CFWN members get annual grants from their provincial governments, but none have topped $20,000 except in exceptional years.
In one of the few remaining federal funding programs, the heads of five national farm women’s groups – Mayberry, Van Dine, Storey and two Quebec groups – hold a conference call twice a year to determine joint priorities. The next phone call will be next week.
Besides the perennial concern about funding, Storey said the group will discuss taxes on off-farm income.