March is recognized as Women’s Month, with March 8th, 2025, also being recognized as International Women’s Day. To celebrate, we wanted to highlight some key contributions made to the fields of Agriculture and Horticulture by notable women. While women have played a key role in food production and preservation for centuries, these women are recognized as contributing key knowledge, processes, and the gathering of community that have led to advances relating to the modern agricultural landscape as we now know it. The notable women mentioned in this article include Maria Sibylla Merian, Rachel Carson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joy Larkcom, and Alice Waters.
While many artists look for flashy subjects and take inspiration from the finer things in life, Maria focused on the things that were right in front of her. With most of her paintings focused on botanical interests, she found herself observing both plants and insect life. Any agriculturalist, horticulturalist, and everyday gardener can tell you how important this relationship is between plants and animals. Without one, you can’t have the other. As Maria observed the world around her she gave particularly close attention to insects. The paintings she produced were incredibly detailed and accurate, lending her work to eventually be used for some insect classifications by Carl Linnaeus, the man credited with assigning thousands of plants and animals their Latin scientific names.
As is historically common across many fields of study, many early scientists were hesitant to cite Maria’s work amid their findings and studies due to her being a female artist. However, her published writings and artwork have remained a marker of her knowledge and contributions. Today, Maria Sibylla Merian is regarded as perhaps the first entomologist for her accurate and detailed study and depiction of not only what insects look like but also their life cycles and how they interact within the environment.
While environmentalism is a hot topic today, it was arguably just as spoken of through the 1950s when the effects of pesticides, water pollutants, and other hazards were being noticed. Leading up to this period of time, pesticides were being widely used and praised for their ability to control insect populations responsible for spreading diseases, including malaria, typhus, and others that were affecting both civil and military populations. One of the most widely used being DDT. According to the EPA, “DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was developed as the first of the modern synthetic insecticides in the 1940s.” Its wide use for livestock, home gardens, and other industrial applications has led to a growing resistance by many insect species.
Amid its decreasing effectiveness, other effects of its use began to be identified, including its ability to persist in the environment, accumulate in tissues, and drift great distances from where it was applied. As a naturalist studying birds and nearby aquatic life, Rachel Carson took notice of how widespread pesticide use was drastically changing the natural wildlife wherever pesticides like DDT were being used. Her observations included the death of birds, fish, and beneficial insects. While her early findings and outreach were often diminished and disregarded in the scientific community simply due to her gender, the publishing of her book “Silent Spring” opened the eyes of middle-class readers to the danger of “DDT and chemical contaminants to animal life and human safety.”
Today, we have a better understanding of why pesticides should be used with great thought and precision. While not all pesticides are something to be feared, they are something to be understood before being used. Thanks to the observations of Rachel Carson and others we know to protect our health, harvest, and resources from contamination and environmental damage. Just as any prescription can become a poison if used incorrectly, so can pesticides. The EPA explains, “The health effects of pesticides depend on the type of pesticide. Some, such as the organophosphates and carbamates, affect the nervous system. Others may irritate the skin or eyes. Some pesticides may be carcinogens. Others may affect the hormone or endocrine system in the body.” While pesticides have their time and place to be used, we encourage growers to understand what they are using in their gardens and how to use it properly.
Learn More About Rachel Carson
Eleanor was a champion of nature conservation and environmental protection, along with her husband and President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt. Eleanor’s drive came from the understanding of how natural processes require time and forward thinking. While President Franklin Roosevelt was well known for his efforts to save destitute farmers during the man-made Dust Bowl disaster before entering the fight of World War II, Eleanor is better known for her efforts to support those at home during WWII by encouraging victory gardens, also known as liberty or war gardens that were first made popular during WWI.
With many farm workers joining the troops, food being rationed, and food being sent to Europe for the troops and refugees, it became more important than ever for those in the United States to produce and harvest their own food. This victory garden movement also grew to include school gardens where those in urban cities could get out of crowded tenements and enjoy some time spent in nature while helping their community. Today’s community gardens are often linked to war-time origins as communities came together to produce their own food to ease the economic impacts of the Great Depression and labor shortages in the Agricultural industry throughout the war.
Larkcom introduced new varieties, techniques, perspectives, and educational content to the world of gardening that are now used globally. While many people gain an interest in agricultural work due to family ties or a need in the community, Joy found her roots by pursuing an interest in growing her own food and understanding how people from around the world grow and use their own harvests. She paired this interest with her skills as a journalist by publishing many books and works of literature that outline unique vegetables along with their planting and harvesting strategies, including cut-and-come-again practices, growing in small gardens, growing unique Asian vegetables, and growing vegetables creatively with ornamental plants.
Joy Larkcom is also a 1993 recipient of the Veitch Memorial Medal, an award given annually by the Royal Horticultural Society to recognize “persons of any nationality who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture.” Along with her efforts to educate people about how to grow their own food, she has also been an advocate for using organic growing practices. Through her global travels, Joy took note of many growing practices that are used around the world that we now consider to be organic in nature due to their sustainable and renewable qualities. Some of these include using heirloom varieties, composting, relying on natural pest control methods over chemical ones, and rotating crops to maintain a diverse growing setting. Joy’s work has helped home gardeners create more diverse, productive, and healthy gardens.
Alice Waters has been a major proponent of the farm-to-table movement since its beginning by serving farm fresh food grown locally in her California restaurant. The farm-to-table movement is recognized as the movement of Americans preferring fresh, locally sourced foods over highly processed food products. While this movement started in the 1960’s, it has recently gained more momentum. As many people today have taken notice of differences in the quality of foods consumed throughout Europe, Alice also saw this difference during her travels through France. The influence of this trip would lead Alice to continue studying French culture at UC Berkeley and eventually open her French-inspired restaurant, Chez Panisse.
The nature of only using fresh food produced locally at her restaurant caused her menu to vary from week to week and season to season. While some would call this a big risk in the restaurant industry, she found great success as the fresh ingredients allowed the food served through her restaurant to be of the highest quality and greatest flavor profiles, as is regularly experienced in other countries and cultures. Alice’s influence has extended beyond the restaurant scene as she also played a key role in establishing the first edible schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, enabling local school children to have greater access to nutritious, fresh foods. By producing a great portion of the foods used, the district was able to eliminate almost all processed foods while increasing access to more nutritious choices while staying within the district’s budget.
While we focused on women who had more influence over the home gardening aspect of agriculture, there are many others who have made incredible contributions to the advances and understanding of agricultural processes relating to ranching, food processing, the transportation of agricultural products, and so much more. If you are interested in learning more about the contributions of women in agriculture, we recommend researching individuals such as Temple Grandin, Dr. Maria Andrade, Dr. Mary Engle Pennington, and Harriet Williams Russell Strong. Each of these women has greatly influenced the way we produce animal and plant-based foods today.
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