If you live in Oakland, it’s very possible that you grow some vegetables in your garden – or at least know someone who does. And if you’re a west Oaklander, you’re close to one of the most prominent food justice groups in the country – People’s Grocery. Any way you look at it, food is a big part of the conversation in Oakland. So, it’s understandable that Oaklanders are excited and/or curious about Temra Costa’s book, Farmer Jane. The book will hit stores only around May 1, but people are already talking about it on Facebook and Twitter.  

In Farmer Jane, Costa profiles 30 women farmers from across the country and explores the impact women are having on our food system. She’s worked with farmers as an advocate for sustainable farming for the past seven years. She’s had many a-ha moments, but one trumps them all. “Noticing that women are leading the charge towards sustainable farming – that’s been the big moment for me,” she says.

Costa became a food activist while she was studying agriculture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison back in 1998. “The connection between what I was eating and studying wasn’t clear until I walked into the Williamson Street co-operative,” she remembers. Soon after, she found herself collecting signatures to maintain the integrity of the organic-certification process by USDA. Since then, it’s been one food campaign after another.

After a stint with Family Farm Defenders, a Madison-based group that works towards a farmer-controlled food system, she landed a job with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), where she she worked on programs of Farm to School and local food sourcing for institutions and businesses until eventually becoming the statewide director of the Buy Fresh Buy Local campaign, which aims to educate people about where their food is coming from. “Through our research, we found that if people have information on where food is coming from at the point of sale, they buy local 75% of time,” she says. “That was important – the moment when a local farmer is chosen over the farmer from Mexico or China.”  

If we’re having a hard time setting up a sustainable regional food system, it’s because American farmers cannot compete in the global market at the current price points, she says. “There’s no way our food producers can compete with China, South America etc.,” she says. To cut costs, they often use what she describes as “slave labor” in the fields – children and undocumented, poorly-paid workers. This is why agricultural workers are still paid so poorly. The solution, in part, is to hold these farms and agribusinesses accountable to labor laws, but also to protect our farms from having to compete with countries that surely do not have such rigid labor and environmental standards.

For the current scenario to change, consumers have to show they care, she emphasizes. The problem is that people aren’t used to having information on where their food is coming from. But recent media efforts like the movie, Food Inc., and books and newspaper articles about our food system and its various industries – dairy, meat packing, etc – have gotten people interested in the origins and sources of their food. And people have begun asking questions. “We need people to continue asking where their food is coming from,” she says. “If they show they care, the government will change the subsidy system and retailers will change the marketing regarding local.”

For Costa, it all comes back to local. It was the Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign that helped her find the women she wanted to write about. She found women from all over the world who are the faces of the modern-day American farm – like Maria Catalan of Catalan farms, the first farm worker to become a farm owner.  The book has stories of 30 women, but on her website, Costa puts up stories regularly of women that are changing the food system for the better, a little bit at a time.

To keep up with Farmer Jane, visit farmerjanes.blogspot.com/