Agency and empowerment on women-owned farms: A Vermont agricultural case study

When examining data from the most recent US Census of Agriculture (2012), I noticed a distinct imbalance between the percentages of male and female farmers, both in the country and in Vermont. Sales from women-owned farms represent only 3.3 percent of the total of U.S. agricultural sales, and in Vermont, women were the principal operators of 22.38 percent of farms. I wanted to examine the factors that led to these imbalances, and also understand from women farmers themselves what strategies they used to overcome these obstacles. The theories of agency and empowerment can be used in explaining women’s inequality in agricultural spheres: agency, usually referencing decision-making power, leads into the process of empowerment. Empowerment is often a “fuzzy” term, or difficult to define, but it revolves around the ability to make choices, access to resources, as well as the subcomponent of achievement. I hoped to find with my research how women farmers went about the processes of agency and empowerment on their farms. I interviewed nineteen women farmers in Vermont from nine different counties about how they started farming, the structure and mission of their farm businesses, employment and management structures, use of support networks and organizations, necessary skills for farming, and whether they felt that their experiences in the world of agriculture were different due to their gender. In their answers to these questions, I teased out what barriers they perceived to their equality in agriculture, how they tried to surmount them as individuals, and also how they used support systems and other collectives to their advantage in the pursuit of both increased agency and empowerment. Although I did hear some stories of overt sexism and unfairness due to gender from some women, my overall findings were less negative/pessimistic and more focused towards an optimistic, equal future than I had expected to find. Many of the women I interviewed had diversification strategies in place on their farms, and many also combined farming with agritourism ventures. Both of these strategies offered an opportunity for agency and empowerment. Women tended to require hands-on instruction in order to comfortably learn new farming skills. Many women noted the importance of informal support networks of other female farmers as a factor of their successes both in learning these skills and in terms of emotional support, and stressed the importance of the Internet in forming and sustaining such networks. These results can be useful to Extension and other agricultural programs who interact with women farmers on a regular basis, as some women felt that these formal networks and organizations did not adequately serve their needs

The preservation and reuse of urban churches as a contribution to the urban landscape

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-112).Through massing , scale, craftsmanship, and their traditional role, church buildings are valuable to the city. They play an important role in the cognitive and formal ordering of the city. They are important to the temporal contect of the city. As the site of milestone events in many people's lives, or as symbols of these events in others' lives, church buildings are important for the collective memory. The grand scale of the church space combined with careful small scale detailing, make it a place with qualities that are rare in the daily life of most people. Because of their importance to the city opportunities and methods to reuse church buildings should be found if the buildings are abandoned by their congregations. Uses should be found that are sympathetic to the spirit and the form of the building. The forms in church architecture are powerful enough that they can survive extensive, yet sensitive, new construction to accommodate a new use and allow the place to read as a new building that was once a church. In order to allow the building to provide a temporal context to the present, when the building is given a new use it must also be given a new image. The elements of the image of a church must be analyzed to discover those which are the most powerful and how they may be changed to allow revealing juxtapositions that say, "this building was a church but is one no longer." In changing the image of the church building, care must be taken not to destroy those qualities which made attempting its reuse worthwhile. These issues are investigated in a series of case studies of reused churches. Several new issues in the redesign of church buildings were discovered through the case studies. The result is a set of observations and conclusions that are a synthesis of the real and the ideal.by Laurie Putscher.M.Arch

Herausforderung Geburt am Telefon in der Einsatzzentrale besser meistern : Simulationstraining mal anders

Beschreibung eines Spezialtrainings für Mitarbeitende der Leitstelle von Schutz & Rettung Zürich zum Thema Geburt

Record Drilling Depth Struck in Greenland

On July 1, 1993, after 5 years of drilling, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) penetrated several meters of silty ice and reached bedrock at a depth of 3053.4 m. It then penetrated 1.5 m into the bedrock, producing the deepest ice core ever recovered (Figure 1). In July 1992, a nearby European ice coring effort, the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP), reached an ice depth of 3028.8 m, providing more than 250,000 years of record. Comparisons between these ice core records have already demonstrated the remarkable reproducibility of the upper ∼90% of the records unparalleled view of climatic and environmental change

The Lantern, 2012-2013

• How They Run • What Was Said in Boston • On the Last Day of the Month • An Angel Tries to Surprise Humans • I Wonder if God Modeled Boys After Books • Marred with Modern Scars • Feather Bed • Ode to a Pen • Objet Petit A • Breaking News: Grownups Fear Return of Disco • Neuroscience • New Document • We Were Stars, and the Sky was Our Grass • About a Man • Trojan • An Ode • Yr Body Sour • That Lake in Jamaica • Live While Chiefs are Still Fighting • Lament for Mathematics • The Robert Frost House • People Fell in Love on Me • Sunday Review • Looks Silly in Tiny Desk Chairs • Two Years Later • Better Than Nothing • Istanbul • Packs of Cigarettes • Sonnet • Outside King of Steaks • Obstinance • Coffee Grinds • Autumn Equinox • Homecoming • Oh, San Francisco • Slide: A Beginning • Slowly Last Summer • Of Dogs and Men • Letters Not Sent • Before the Race • The Little Things • Tarpon Springs • Payment for Rebellion • Wednesday • When is President\u27s Day? • Heartless Parallels and Perpendiculars • Railway • Presto Agitato • Easier Said Than Done • Waves • Four White Women • Rope • Alter Ego Self Portrait • Pebbles • Coney Island • Guanjuanto • Growth • Evolve • Winter Blackout • Honeybee • Frames • Wanderlust • Guiding Light 1 • Frick\u27s Lock • The Ones That Never Leave • In Memoriam: Rachel Blunthttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/lantern/1179/thumbnail.jp