BY ANNA
EGELAND
Though one may think first of the many
differences between Iowa and Afghanistan, one local expert said women's roles
in agriculture is one of the several similarities between the two.
Denise O'Brien, an organic farmer from
Atlantic, Iowa, returned in April from a yearlong stay in Afghanistan, where
she served as an agricultural adviser for the U.S. Department of Agriculture
Office of Foreign Service Operations/Overseas. She spoke to a small group of
friends and colleagues on Tuesday night at the Newman Catholic Student Center,
104 E. Jefferson St., about her experiences.
O'Brien said one of the similarities she
noticed was the local-food infrastructure, which Iowa has been shifting toward
and is already present in Afghanistan.
She said her main duty as an agricultural
advisor was to work with Afghanistan's Directorate of Agriculture,
Infrastructure and Livestock on making agriculture more transparent.
"One of the big things was to work on
anti-corruption … everybody wants to skim off something for themselves,"
she said, citing the sale of weak seed and livestock as corrupt practices.
Despite the problems with agriculture in
Afghanistan, she said, Iowa farmers could learn from farming practices in
Afghanistan. Upon her return to Iowa, she noticed the extensive soil erosion on
Iowa farms and thinks agriculture in Afghanistan could provide clues for how to
handle the problem.
O'Brien, who cofounded the Women, Food and
Agriculture Network in 1997, said the organization is working on a project
called Women Caring for the Land, which includes listening sessions across
Iowa. Women own half of the rentable farm land in Iowa, she said.
"Women have a very strong conservation
ethic … women feel very strongly about the land and want to preserve the
land," she said.
Leigh Adcock, the executive director of the
organization, said that while not everyone in the network farms organically,
most women choose to participate in small-scale diversified agricultural
farming as opposed to commodity agriculture.
"At the time this group was formed,
there weren't very many groups for women involved in [small-scale
agriculture]," Adcock said. She noted that the number of organizations has
increased since then.
Across the ocean in Afghanistan, more than
7,000 miles away, women are very involved in farming and agriculture.
"Many times, [women are] just behind the
walls of the compound where lots of the farming goes on," O'Brien said.
"They contribute incredible amounts to make agriculture viable and receive
very little credit and very little income."
Karen Mason, the curator of the Iowa Women's
Archives, noted that women and agriculture have long been linked.
"I think that women are very close to
food traditionally because they are the preparers — that, of course, has
changed over the years …" she said.
While the small-scale, local agriculture in
Afghanistan is an ideal model for some Iowa farmers, there are still valuable
systems that the United States can share with Afghanistan.
"We were setting up a system in
Afghanistan similar to the extension system in the United States," O'Brien
said.
The cooperative extension system is a network
of state, local, and regional offices that provide "useful, practical, and
research-based information to agricultural producers, small-business owners,
youth, consumers, and others in rural areas and communities of all sizes,"
according to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture official website.
"We worked with leadership, we worked
with anti-corruption, and we helped people scale up in poultry
production," O'Brien said. "We covered the whole spectrum of what
agriculture is about."
Mason said the Iowa Women's Archives are
working hard to ensure that O'Brien's stories are not lost.
"We're making sure that all of her
efforts with women and agriculture are being preserved," she said.
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