Let’s work together.
This tool is for
Everyone, who:
- Wants to advance agroecology and food sovereignty.
- Is fighting for better working conditions for everyone in agriculture.
- Cares about the future of rural territories and small-scale farming.
- Is working to ensure secure land access for young farmers.
- Wants to better understand the day-to-day realities faced by farmers, especially women, across Europe.
this tool
helps you:
- Break down policy: Get a clearer picture of the key issues in agriculture today.
- See the big picture: Make visible the realities and possibilities of a just transformation in EU agriculture.
- Uncover the root causes: Identify the structural problems that keep the system from changing.
- Find what works: Learn from examples and strategies that are already making a difference and hold hope.
- Make informed decisions: Give social movements, NGOs, researchers, and policymakers the evidence and insights needed to drive real change.
- Advocate for structural change: Offers tools and strategies to advance agroecology across Europe.
WHO WE ARE
About SWIFT
We are a network of social movements, farmers, researchers, NGOs, and practitioners dedicated to secure more equitable farming futures. This network consolidated around the EU-funded SWIFT Project. SWIFT stands for Supporting Women-Led Innovations in Farming and Rural Territories.
This advocacy-support tool will hopefully feed into the transformation of future agri-food systems.
But do we really need more women in farming?
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
Farmers’ Age in the EU
Current average age
Farmers under
40 years
Of current farmers
Share of women within these 12% of farmers under 40
Among young farmers
we did the research. here is what we found.
Farming is not a single experience. It represents a multitude of lived realities. Gender, race, age, class, sexual diversity are some of the intersecting dynamics that shape these experiences. The data and stories collected here are grounded in research and diverse, lived experiences of farmers across Europe, and beyond.
Do you want to Hear the Full Story?
Major CAP subsidies are paid on the basis of farm size. This leads to problems such as uneven distribution of funding that prioritises larger and wealthier farms. Another problem is that the subsidies favour intensification – larger monocultures, heavier input use, and more intensive livestock systems – instead of rewarding biodiversity and landscape stewardship.
Take a look at how subsidies are concentrated within different countries:
What does this have to do with gender?
Why do so few women* receive CAP-Subsidies
A key reason why this inequality persists is the CAP’s failure to value different
ways of farming. In doing so, it failts to account for the needs and experiences of
women* farmers, and it’s not designed to support small holder
or agroecological farming either.
CAP view on agriculture
Farming is not one thing: there are significant variations influenced by factors such as cultural norms, geography, infrastructure and more. Not all of these are captured in the national or EU policies.
Many of the subsidies in the CAP encourage intensification of farming, often at the expense of maintaining biodiversity and keeping rural areas attractive.
Farming and especially female* realities
We do know that women’s experiences differ from many men’s, as they often bear substantial social and care responsibilities and have less starting capital (in terms of money, land, education).
Data shows that women more frequently engage in small-scale farming that prioritises local food production, environmental protection, sustainability, and community involvement. These differences need to be accounted for and designed into policy from the start.
What are the concrete barriers?
READY TO ENGAGE?
Do you want to push for more inclusive and feminist agricultural policies?
We have gathered diverse strategies and tool that can serve as starting points!
The cost of failing to attract young farmers.
READY TO ENGAGE?
Do you want to push for more inclusive and feminist agricultural policies?
We have gathered diverse strategies and tool that can serve as starting points!
Why do women* have less access to land?
Land access is central to agricultural production. But, land is not equally accessible to everyone.
Research consistently highlights deeply entrenched, gendered patterns in how agricultural land is inherited and acquired, alongside women’s* lower access to finance, time, agricultural education, and more. This leads to disparities in operational scale between farms run by women* and those run by men. To understand this, we took a closer look at land inheritance and acquisition.
Average farm size by Gender
Inheritance remains by far the most common pathway to land ownership, a process that historically and continuously favors male family members.
Data shows that men inherit land significantly more often than women — a trend that persists across Europe, regardless of the differing national legal frameworks in place. This disparity reveals that land distribution is dictated less by statutory law and much more by deeply ingrained cultural and gender norms.
As a result of inheriting less land, women* have to buy or rent arable land. But prices for land are already high and rising.
Research shows that around the world, differences in land access are one of the major causes for social and gender inequalities in rural areas.
In Europe, new farmers, experience difficulty accessing land due to limited availability and the rising prices of buying or renting the land, as well as accessing financing. We know that women* farmers in particular, face greater challenges in accessing bank loans, and tend to rely more on private resources than male farmers.
The average cost of 1 hectare of arable land in the
EU is €15,224.
Speculative purchases can drive up prices and further restrict
access for newcomers.
The bigger the better?
In addition to the structural barriers that limit the average size of women-led holdings, many women actively prefer smallholder farming” to “Women are more likely to engage in smallholder farming and set different priorities.
For example, they prioritise having enough time to manage their diverse social roles (e.g. being a farmer, but also a mother) which can be easier to achieve on a smaller farm.
Challenges in ensuring women’s access to land.
What’s the problem if fewer people have access to land?
Land ownership rates among young farmers in Europe averages just 37%. And what about younger women? The data tells us that , on average, young farmers own only 37% of farmland in Europe. Given the barriers we explored above, we can expect that if we disaggregated this for women, it would be lower.
Without fairer access to land, we risk losing the next generation of farmers and the resilience of our food systems.
As farmland becomes concentrated in fewer, larger holdings, decisions about what is grown and how it is managed become concentrated as well.
This often replaces locally-adapted farming practices and diverse crop varieties with more standardized production systems, reducing both agricultural diversity and regional food autonomy.
Land access is coordinated at the national and even subnational level. This means every country is different. However, the EU Strategy for Generational Renewal in Agriculture promotes least three strategies (though these are not formal policies):
READY TO ENGAGE?
Do you want to push for more inclusive and feminist agricultural policies?
We have gathered diverse strategies and tool that can serve as starting points!
Resource Library
Quick Access to all Resources
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A better Future is possible.Let’s work together.
Intro to Agroecology:
Peasant agroecology is a way of life that supports life-enriching systems, while opposing life-alienating systems. Learn more about Peasant Agroecology
Ecologically it works together with nature and not against it. It cherishes synergies between living beings and prioritizes traditional farmer knowledge and participatory, transgenerational, and experiential learning processes.
Economically it bases its principles on forms of economy that are truly beneficial for communities: solidarity, circular, regional, within ecological boundaries.
Politically it places the small-scale food producers rights as a priority on the agenda and we form a movement towards equality and social justice for all people worldwide.
Find out more about the projects
and its partners in the SWIFT portal.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement:
101084561 – SWIFT- HORIZON-CL6-2022-COMMUNITIES-01
Check out our website here https://swiftproject.eu
Dr Jessica Duncan
Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University.
Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN Wageningen, The Netherlands.
jessica.duncan@wur.nl
