As dawn breaks across South Africa, a woman is already at her desk reviewing a supply contract before the rest of the office arrives. Another is standing in a laboratory testing soil samples. A third is on a call with a government department, shaping the policy that will decide how the next harvest gets to market. None of them are on a farm. All of them are agriculture.
By Ella Mogashoa, a researcher in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the North-West University (NWU)
There is an irony in how rarely this picture gets told. For a sector that has depended on women’s labour for generations, the story we still reach for first is the smallest possible version of what they do.
On 9 August 1956, an estimated 20 000 women of all races marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to present a petition against the pass law regulations that dictated where Black South Africans could live, work and move.¹ Viewed through the right lens, that march was never only about paperwork. It was a declaration that exclusion, however it is dressed up, is not something to be politically endured.
It is a history worth returning to, not as nostalgia, but as a measuring stick. Seventy years on, the question has changed. We no longer ask whether women can enter spaces they were historically shut out of. We ask something more pointed: once inside, what are they achieving? In agriculture, the honest answer deserves far more attention than it currently gets.
The discussion should move beyond who is present in the sector. We should be asking what women are building once they are there and whether the industry is structured to let them build it.
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The curated picture
Mention the phrase “women in agriculture” in casual conversation, and a very specific image tends to surface: a woman with a basket of vegetables or tending chickens in a backyard. It is a comforting picture. It is also a fallacy – incomplete at best; quietly dismissive at worst.
The real picture needs repainting. Women in agriculture are negotiating supply contracts. They are analysing price trends and forecasting yields. They are running food processing companies and programmes, conducting research, advising on government policy frameworks, and managing commercial farms. The list goes on. Reducing that scope of work to “growing vegetables” doesn’t just understate it; it erases it.
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The visibility gap
As of the second quarter of 2023, 431 000 women were employed on farms in South Africa, making up 28% of the total agricultural workforce – a slight increase from 27% in 2020.² On paper, that looks like meaningful participation. This is not the full story; the numbers tell an uncomfortable narrative.
Set that figure against another: in 2023, only 24% of land in South Africa was owned by women.² Women are also less likely than men to be employed in commercial farming. In Q2 2023, just 30% of women working in agriculture were in commercial farming roles, compared with 43% of men.² Read together, these statistics say something the employment number alone cannot.
The economy has always been dependent on women’s labour in this sector; the data makes that clear. What it has not consistently offered in return is equal recognition, equity or a stake in what that labour builds.
Women make up a substantial share of the workforce that sustains agriculture, yet hold a far smaller share of the ownership, capital,and decision-making power that workforce generates. That gap between contribution and recognition is the real story hiding behind a participation rate that looks, at first glance, respectable.
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Redefining what agriculture means
Ask a young woman who says she wants to work in agriculture what she means, and the first question she’s often met with is: “So you want to own a farm?”
That question, however well-meaning, reveals exactly how narrowly agriculture is still being defined for women and why that definition urgently needs to change. Agriculture is not one job. It is finance, supply chain, technology, logistics, trade, marketing, research, and operations, all moving through the lens of food and land.
The point worth making clearly: There is room for women who are passionate about any part of that chain; not only the parts that fit the old picture.
Looking beyond the old picture
The conversation about women in agriculture presents an opportunity for broader reflection – one that goes beyond simply counting how many women have entered the sector.
Resilience was never the question. Women have been carrying this industry, often unpaid and unrecognised, for generations. The question now is whether the sector is finally ready to see the full range of what they are building, and whether ownership, leadership and recognition will catch up with the work already being done.
Our greatest investment should be in seeing women in agriculture fully – not as an exception to a male-dominated field, but as engineers of finance, science, trade and policy who happen to work in food and land. When that full picture is recognised, the sector stops asking whether women belong in it and starts asking what it has been missing by defining them so narrowly for so long.
References
- South African History Online, 20 000 Women march to the Union Buildings in protest of pass laws – sahistory.org.za
- Parliament of South Africa, Women’s Parliament Research Papers, Expanding Agricultural and Rural Development Opportunities for Rural Women in South Africa (citing Stats SA data) – parliament.gov.za
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of African Farming.
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The forgotten cost of food production in South Africa
Borders and jobs: What the ‘March and March’ debate means for SA’s agricultural labour force
