2016-12-05



I have spent a lot of this year asking myself how I can contribute to my community and beyond. As you may know, that has come in the form of publishing Comestible. Creating a platform for telling stories about food and food production has felt like the right thing for me to be doing, a way to contribute to the world in a creative and educational way.

But I wanted that platform to be able to do more. So I called up my friend Audra Mulkern of The Female Farmer Project. I love Audra’s work, and she is an amazing advocate for women farmers and sustainable agriculture.

I had made Audra a papercut inspired by one of her photographs earlier in the year, intending to eventually use it in Comestible. But in instead, it spawned an idea. “What if we did a series of cards and used them to raise money to support female farmers?”

So here we are.

I made three more papercuts inspired by Audra’s original photographs, and we turned them into a series of greeting cards called I Look Like a Farmer. The cards are 5×7″ (so perfect for framing even if you don’t want to send them!) and printed locally in Seattle, WA at woman-owned printing company Girlie Press.

50% of the proceeds of these cards are going to female farmers, in two different ways.

Half of it will be donated to women working in agriculture through Kiva

The other half will go to supporting the work of Women, Food and Agriculture Network.



Why is the work of female farmers important? Women account for an estimated two-thirds of the world’s 600 million livestock keepers and make up 43 per cent of the agricultural workforce in developing countries; women are an essential part of food production. And yet, in Asia, Africa and Latin America women own less than 20 per cent of agricultural land. This makes land ownership and rights a crucial part of agricultural policy.

There’s also the question of sustainability. Here in the U.S. the number of women in agriculture is growing, and that has the potential to have a large impact in how our food is grown. Women are making a big impact in the world of sustainable agriculture, as they tend to focus on diversity of crops as well as growing food over commodity crops. And yet, men earn up to 17 times as much as their female colleagues.



While these cards aren’t going to change any of these inequalities overnight, we do hope that they will create some awareness for the issues that female farmers face, and encourage you to check out the organizations who support them.

Each I Look Like a Farmer set contains four cards and costs $18. If you would like to purchase them, click here.

Images: Audra Mulkern

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