For 56-year-old Tammy Burnell, who lost everything she owned in the 2008 Iowa floods, it’s the freedom to stand in the verdant fields of Burnell Farms in Royston, Ga., and call out to the heavens — and know no one can hear her. 
 
 Hannah Breckbill, 25, walked from a career as a mathematician and settled in Elgin, Minn., planting Humble Hands Harvest “to work in something real and be the change I want to see happen in this world.” 
 
 Forty-one-year-old Pilar Rebar quit her job as a pesticide applicator when she realized she had been told lies about the chemicals she was spraying on crops. Vowing to only grow “clean and healthy food,” she started up Sunnyside Organic Seedlings in Richmond, Calif. 
 
 Meet three of America’s female farmers, the most rapidly growing segment of the nation’s changing agricultural landscape. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service reported last month that the number of woman-operated farms more than doubled between 1982 and 2007. Add primary and secondary operators, and there are nearly 1 million women in farming, accounting for 30 percent of U.S. farmers. 
 
 So hot is ag life that novels about farming are replacing chick lit, offering an unexpected twist to the notion of dirty romance. 
 
 Unlike the Farmettes and Women’s Land Army that took over while men fought in World War II, women today see farming as both a mission and a passion. Some want to provide healthy food for the masses. Others are looking to build community or live a life of deeper meaning. 
 
 “Women want to be outside, they want to be near family. There’s lots of interest in where our food comes from, how it was grown,” says Kathleen Merrigan, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We are seeing more beginning farmers coming in and I think the trend is going to continue. Women are [already] outnumbering men in owning smaller farms.” 
 
 They arrive on farms — urban and rural, large and small — from two opposite worlds. Many are 40 and older, leaving behind office jobs and careers for the opportunity to get their hands dirty and create something tangible. At the other end of the spectrum are younger women who are coming out of agricultural and environmental science programs with a dedication to food justice, education, and reminding a nation led astray by fast food and TV dinners where its sustenance really comes from. There is also an older generation of women who have outlived their husbands and now own vast amounts of farm and ranchland. 
 
 Combined, they are making new inroads for women who are determined to build a life around farming. 
 
 Tammy Steele, director of the Oklahoma-based National Women In Agriculture Association, says female farmers have gained the respect not only of the USDA but also of the national farming community. That was missing, Steele explains, during the ’60s back-to-the-land movement, when women were more concerned with breaking the glass ceiling in corporate America than they were in tilling the earth. 
 
 What’s more, female farmers have shattered the old stereotypes. St. Paul, Minn.’s Der Thou grows flowers. Teresa Brockman of Eureka, Ill., grows 25 varieties of fruit on her Sunny Lane Farm. Debby Zygielbaum, in her 30s, raises sheep and grows organic grapes, olives, and fruits for Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Napa Valley, Calif. These women are a garden of variety. 
 
 Women do face some unique challenges in this business. Since women’s farms tend to be smaller, many need assistance with business plans and financing. Access to equipment can be limited. Many seek advice on marketing and how to get their goods to the public. As a result, we’ve seen the emergence of organizations such as the National Women In Agriculture Association and the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, both of which are seeing their memberships soar, as well as other, less formal networks. 
 
 Not everyone needs help, of course. Haylene Green, 68, farms alone on a single acre in Atlanta’s tough West End, raising organic Caribbean vegetables, among them her famous “huge fatty bum-bum” tropical pumpkins. But others set up businesses with friends, sisters, brothers, same-sex partners, fathers, mothers. They’ve created sisterhoods, networks for sharing livestock and tractors, seeds, labor, financial assistance, and know-how. 
 
 Many of these networks are still unrecognized by the mainstream, but some are breaking into the open. Soil Sisters offers tours of organic farms in south-central Wisconsin as part of MOSES, the Midwest Organic Sustainable Education Service. The MOSES Rural Women’s Project is led by 46-year-old Lisa Kivirist of Browntown, Wis., who with her husband left a career in advertising at Chicago’s Leo Burnett 17 years ago to start the Inn Serendipity Farm and B&B. Annie’s Project, which offers assistance with everything from risk management to business plans to marketing, has expanded nationally. 
 
 It makes perfect sense, says Merrigan, the former USDA chief: “Women are agriculturalists globally. The U.S. is trying to catch up.” 
 
 What is most apparent, though, is how content these women are with their agrarian lives. “Women make the food choices, they make the choices on what to feed their family, so their movement into farming is very natural,” says Temra Costa, author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat and the force behind the website Farmer Jane. Costa lives outside of Oakland, Calif., where she homesteads with chickens and a small vegetable plot. 
 
 Tammy Burnell, for her part, says she’s known she wanted to be a farmer since she was 6 years old. Throughout the years she kept having a dream, even though she lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that she was growing vegetables in Georgia, near a pond. “Then the flood came and we lost everything,” Burnell says. What next? She typed “Georgia Organics” into Google and up came an 85-acre farm for rent. “So we loaded our ’57 red Chevy truck bearing a water ring from the flood and took off.” 
 
 Burnell uses a plot of the farm she rents to teach young women to farm. She calls them “the blooms.” “What do I love about farming? Teaching. And being able to say I want a fresh salad and walking 20 feet and picking lettuce or a sweet pea for me and a customer,” Burnell says. “Like all the women farming and wanting to farm, I know this: We all want to lift our hands and praise the food, trees, and birds, and scream on the top of our lungs how great it is. And no one hears, not a soul.” ||||| In the four years I’ve served as Deputy Secretary, I’ve talked with thousands of women in agriculture – from young women thinking about entering farming to older women who have been tilling the soil for decades. Each of their stories is powerful on its own. But taken together, they have been an inspiration to the entire country. And today, we know that there are nearly one million of these stories around the country – nearly one million women farming and ranching on America’s working lands. 
 
 A study released today by USDA’s Economic Research Service, Characteristics of Women Farm Operators and Their Farms found that the number of women-operated farms more than doubled between 1982 and 2007. When all women involved with farming are added up – including primary and secondary operators – they are nearly one million strong and account for 30% of U.S. farmers. 
 
 The study also found that the number of women-operated farms increased in all sales classes, suggesting that size does not matter when it comes to agricultural opportunity for women. 
 
 This puts real numbers to a trend that many of us have seen firsthand: there is serious momentum behind women in agriculture. This is personally gratifying for me – supporting women in agriculture has long been one of my passions. And it is a sign of the growing importance of USDA efforts to reach women farmers and ranchers. 
 
 While at USDA, I’ve made this a priority. For instance, in the last four years, USDA’s Farm Service Agency has made significant modifications to its County committee structure to ensure fair representation of minority and women producers. 
 
 We are also highlighting the accomplishments of women in agriculture, even as we work to ensure that USDA programs serve them better. Through the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, we’ve seen how women are driving the development of local and regional food systems across the country. Last fall, I penned an op-ed with another women leader in agriculture, New Hampshire Agricultural Commissioner Lorraine Stuart Merrill, about the contributions women are making in the Granite State’s economy through local food. 
 
 The ERS study also finds that women are leaders in livestock production. Nearly half of our country’s women-operated farms—those for which a woman is primarily responsible for making the business decisions—specialize in livestock. During a White House Google+ Hangout about women in agriculture, I talked with Cory Carman, a fourth-generation rancher from eastern Oregon who left farming for another career only to follow her heart back to Carman Ranch to raise cattle. Now she is the operator of a thriving direct-marketing beef business. 
 
 For me, one of the most exciting findings of the ERS report is that younger women are entering farming faster than older women are leaving. Women also have a higher land ownership rate than their male counterparts, with 85% of women owning all of the land they farm, compared to 66% of their male counterparts. 
 
 But women farmers and ranchers still have a ways to go. More women than men rely on off-farm income, suggesting that farming cannot support them full-time. Only 5% of women-operated farms have sales of $100,000 or more. 
 
 Tonight, I will be traveling to LaCrosse, WI to join WomenShare 2013, an event focused on women in the food system. This will be my last official travel as Deputy Secretary of USDA. As I prepare to leave my post as the highest ranking woman at the Department, know that I will continue to work on advancing women’s opportunities in agriculture. One million women is only the beginning. ||||| Gallery Books; NAL Trade; Jove 
 
 Chick lit—hot pink covers featuring martini glasses and Manolos, stylish city girl heroines navigating the urban jungle in search of love and career—seems to have gone the way of Friends and the dotcom bubble. "A visit to any chain bookstore will testify that its heyday has definitely passed," says Salon, quoting an editor who says, "We've pretty much stopped publishing chick lit." 
 
 "[T]he bloom is off the "chick lit" rose," agrees The Economist. 
 
 Well I have news. Yes, chick lit is dead (or dying, at least). But in its place, we now have a new genre. Call it "farm lit." 
 
 In farm lit books, our heroines ditch the big cities beloved in chick lit—New York, Chicago, LA—in favor of slower, more rural existences, scrappily learning to raise goats on idyllic Vermont farms or healing their broken hearts by opening cupcake bakeries in their sweet Southern hometowns. Instead of sipping $16 appletinis with the girls, they're mucking out barns and learning to knit. Instead of pining after Mr. Big, they're falling for the hunky farmer next door. 
 
 In Georgia's Kitchen, Georgia Gray 's job "at one of Manhattan's best restaurants" and her relationship with her handsome lawyer fiancé go sideways, causing her to run off to the earthy pleasures of rural Tuscany. In The House on Oyster Creek, Charlotte Tradescome trades Manhattan and her workaholic husband for tending bivalves with a local oysterman on Cape Cod, where she falls "in love with the locals' down-to-earth way of life." In Magnolia Wednesdays, Vivien Gray's career in New York investigative journalism gets her shot (literally), and she repairs to Georgia, where she discovers that "maybe life inside a picket fence isn't so bad after all." In The Lost Husband, young widow Libby Moran takes off for a rural Texas goat farm and a dalliance with a "gruff" farm manager.
– One of the biggest changes in agriculture isn't so much about what type of seeds are being planted as who is planting them: women. Grist expands on a USDA study showing that the number of farms run by women has nearly tripled in the last three decades. Add in secondary operators, and women now account for 30% of American farmers. The trend is accelerating of late, and Grist sees two general groups—women 40 and older who are ditching office jobs and 20-somethings coming out of school with agriculture or environmental science degrees. A few general characteristics: Women's farms are typically on the small side, with only 5% registering sales of $100,000 or more, says a blog post from USDA deputy chief Kathleen Merrigan. Along those lines, more female farmers rely on "off-the-farm" income than their male counterparts. 85% of women own the land they farm, versus 66% of male farmers. Younger women are entering farming at a faster clip than older women are leaving. And finally, "so hot is ag life that novels about farming are replacing chick lit, offering an unexpected twist to the notion of dirty romance," writes Grist's Lori Rotenberk, referring to this story in the Atlantic.