Applying abduction and rctroduction in the SFWS

Analysis of the interview transcripts and documents revealed several notable demi-rcgularities. The first set of these dcmi-regularitics pertained to women’s work - specifically, the marginalisation of women’s farm work and their motivations for working off-farm. Although all but one of the participants was actively engaged in farm work of some type, and many of the participants regularly performed a wide variety of tasks, the most commonly named role (mentioned by 20 of the 29 participants) was a variant of ‘helping out’ - for example, acting as ‘hired hand’ or ‘hired man’, ‘employee’, ‘go for’, or ‘assistant’. The qualitative data showed that, with only a few exceptions, men were viewed as the main farmers, while women’s work was portrayed as peripheral. One participant summarised this trend by saying:

A lot of times the men take all of the responsibility for the financial planning and dealings and that type of thing and other times the women are doing it, but it’s still not really their decision at the end of the day.

Another participant commented: ‘We’re, kind of, behind the lines supporting what they’re doing on the front’.

Like nearly half of Canadian farmers many of the farm women held off-farm employment in addition to their farm duties (Statistics Canada 2017). The women in the SFWS also performed the overwhelming majority (89%) of unwaged domestic and caregiving work within their respective households and families. To find out why women were working off-farm in addition to their many other tasks, particularly while reporting heavy workloads and stress, I used a questionnaire with a quantitative Likert-type question (0 = not at all a factor; 6 = the most significant factor). In light of the financial challenges that many family-farms experience, and in light of women’s already heavy responsibilities at home and on the farm, I expected that off-farm work was done mostly out of financial necessity. Therefore, my expectation was that ‘cam money to support the farm operation’ would be most highly rated as a motivation. However, to my surprise, the most highly rated reason for working off-farm was ‘personal goals and self-fulfilment’ (average score of 4.13), followed by earning money for household needs (average score of 4.08), and earning money for ‘wants’ or luxury items (3.42). Earning money to support the farm was, in fact, the least significant motivator, with an average score of only 2.05.

Another interview question added more complexity to the findings: despite the emphasis on personal goals as a motivator, when asked about their ideal working conditions in a world where money was not an issue, 10 out of the 20 women working off-farm indicated that they would choose to amend their current working conditions. Their preferred options included, in particular, ones that would have allowed them to reduce hours at their off-farm job or (in a few cases) to quit their off-farm job to focus entirely on farm or household work.

The second set of significant dcmi-rcgularitics pertained to changes in the political-economic structure of agriculture more broadly. Participants often spoke of the increasing power of others (variously construed as corporations, government, or actors unknown to the participants) over the economic conditions of agriculture. In particular, the women reported an overarching experience of lost control over the conditions of production, market prices, and input costs.

When asked about changes in seed policy, one participant stated that the system is ‘just taking the power and control away from farmers so much [that] it gets to the point where you’ve got [farmers] backed into a comer’. Loss of control was also linked to the aforementioned two policy changes, although the policies were not seen as the only causal factors. Participants noted, for instance, that the Crow elimination had increased their costs of production and that this policy change had driven the dual trends of farm-size growth and rural depopulation, as farmers adapted to the increased financial pressure either by

The reality of gender (ideology) 215 increasing the size of their farm or leaving it entirely. The implementation of PBR, they reported, had also limited what farmers could and could not do with their seed, while facilitating capital accumulation for the makers of those seed varieties. These findings were supported not only by the existing literature on corporatisation in agriculture (c.g. Baines 2017; Epp and Whitson 2001; Kuyck 2007) but also by my document analyses, which demonstrated the increasing presence and power of private and corporate actors in the policymaking process (Fletcher 2013).