Valerie Ehrenholz is busy on the family farm.
Her to-do list varies by season, but last Thursday it included caring for the cattle; setting up an electric fence and tending to a barbed-wire fence; and helping her father, who seeded a field to grow grain.
If time allowed, she'd tend to her garden, which features potatoes, lettuce, carrots, peas, tomatoes and eggplants. There are saskatoon berry trees and blueberry and raspberry bushes too, but they were planted last year, so she doesn't harvest much from them yet.
"It's pretty fun," said Ehrenholz, a third-generation farmer running Ehrenholz Farms in Barrhead, Alta. "It's what I've known all of my life. It's not something that I have to learn all at once.
"At the same time, there's a lot of pressure that, if something goes wrong, it's not just myself I'm letting down. There's a lot of family who — they wouldn't blame me, but it would be disappointing for them if the farm failed."
Statistics Canada gathers and releases information about the country's farms and agriculture industry every five years. The 2021 agriculture census data was released last month.
There are 57,200 farmers in Alberta, down 405 from 2016 — and about 19,000 fewer than in 2001.
The proportion of female farmers, however, has grown over the past 20 years.
In 2001, females made up about 28 per cent of all Alberta farmers. Now about one in every three farmers is a woman.
The number of female farmers also grew by 765 to 18,525 in the latest census period.
Women, historically, have worked in farming in various ways, but the increase suggests more women are being recognized for their role, said Ellen Goddard, an agricultural economist at the University of Alberta.
"The job itself is changing its definition. Maybe that means it's more amenable to everybody chipping in, and more families are recognizing the contribution of more than one senior member of the household," Goddard said.
The trend could lead to more innovation in the industry, as women tend to try new things more often than their male counterparts, said Tom Johnston, a University of Lethbridge associate professor of geography, whose focus is local food systems.
"It's a really great thing," Johnston said.
"The more diversity we have in the industry, the more likely it is that those innovations are going to be embraced."
There is often an added pressure for women running farms, though, said Ehrenholz, who took over from her father in 2017.
"We want to prove we can do it, so we don't ask for help much," she said. "We forget that our fathers asked the neighbour for help."
There are more farms in Alberta in 2021 than there were five years before, but it's not a clean comparison.
Data shows the number of farms in Alberta is 41,505, up 867 from 2016. But StatsCan changed the definition of a "farm" or an "agricultural holding" for the latest census, so one cannot accurately compare to years past.
Previously, a farm was defined as an "agricultural production" that produced at least one agricultural product intended for sale, according to StatsCan's website.
They now refer to "a unit that produces agricultural products and reports revenues or expenses for tax purposes to the Canada Revenue Agency."
Although there seem to be more farms, data shows the total area of farmland has dropped from about 20.3 million hectares in 2016, to about 19.9 million hectares in 2021.
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