Women are farmers too. (A thread.)

Seeing some comments forgetting this, so dropping this to clarify women's role in farming and affirm that the current challenge to the farm bills is an issue of not only agricultural prosperity but gender equality. (1/15)

#FarmersProtests2020

First, some background: The Green Revolution spearheaded in the 60s had a direct impact on female labor, shifting women's work from the field to the domestic sphere. Prior to this, women had a larger role in farming processes and greater earning/decision making power. (2/15)

Once agricultural tasks became mechanized and delegated to laborers, women's work became largely secluded to inside the home, where it had less income potential and the disparity in decision-making power over farm activities grew. (3/15)

Historically, women's work in agriculture varied from region to region. Women planked and leveled the soil, spread manure, watered fields, prepared and sowed seeds, harvested wheat, picked cotton, decobbed corn, stripped can, and harvested groundnuts. (4/15)

Read: women are farmers too. (5/15)

With the Green Revolution/current emphasis on inputs as the primary means to sustain production and the disposability of the land, women's knowledge of crops have been marginalized by programs that exclusively support crops that sell at high market value. (6/15)

It is in fact Central government policies are what have rendered women farmers invisible. As Punjabis, we must recognize that (7/15).

With GOI policies that largely favoring male farmers (who have also been used as disposable labor and whose land is also deemed disposable), India operates under the venere is that women do not play a role in agricultural production. This is entirely untrue. (8/15)

In Punjab itself, a 2005 study by Rupinder Kaur at PAU found that women's worksdays were recorded to be 55 to 92 percent longer than their male counterparts. But this is not seen. Women's work is largely invisible in census data. (9/15)

Women still labor hard in animal husbandry, dairying, milking, feeding, and bathing animals, and subsistence work such as home gardening, seed preservation, and agrobiodiversity management (read: keeping our lands viable). (10/15)

Women play a vital role in providing nutrition to rural households through their careful selection and knowledge of vegetables, legumes, grains, and oils used in food preparation. (11/15)

Read: women are farmers too. (12/15)

Further, their knowledge of cultivars extends beyond the crops that are produced for the market, since many women admit that food produced for the market is not adequate to feed their families. (13/15)

If the central government dares to remove MSP through the Farm Bills, it would only be sensible to replace it with incentives for biologically diverse agriculture, including millets, pulses, and other crops to preserve the land as well as rainwater harvesting (14/15)

And finally, provide financial and market support for the development of women's enterprises to support their knowledge of farm systems. Because, yes, women are farmers too, recognizing this is vital to the future of the land, food security, and a strong agrarian economy. (15/15)