For an economics major, Shira Kamm is handy with a shovel or a hoe. And she's cozy behind the wheel of a truck or a tractor.
But she does tire of questions about how she manages that 12-foot truck, assumptions that she must be gay, and unwanted advice from guys.
Such is the lot of the female farmer.
Kamm, 30, just signed on to lease land from a retired couple in Glen Mills to start her own farm: Wild Goose Garden, on four acres near Cheyney University.
And that puts her among a new breed of city slickers - urbanite devotees of the Do-It-Yourself culture, committed to sustainability and ready to put their jeans to good use.
They are a small but growing force. Since Pennsylvania did its first count in 1980, the number of independent farmers who are women - that is, women who run the place - more than doubled, from 5 to 11 percent.
And when the census includes all farm workers, the number of women is 27 percent, says Carolyn Sachs, who heads the Women's Studies department at the Pennsylvania State University and cofounded the Pennsylvania Women's Agricultural Network. The data reflect what's happening nationally.
"There are more women-owned businesses in lots of fields," Sachs says. Farming is no exception.
The numbers include wives and daughters working land they grew up on, and women on inner-city farms such as Mill Creek in West Philadelphia and Greensgrow in Kensington.
But the majority are like Kamm - college-educated women on small- and medium-size farms outside the city.
They're not necessarily in it for the money.
"They're trying to make a living, but they have other goals than the financial bottom line," Sachs says. "They also want balance in their lives."
Most are drawn, like Kamm, by the satisfaction, the independence, and the chance to put their beliefs to work.
Many left careers in business or nonprofit fields for this life. Kamm was director of development for two nonprofits before going into farming four years ago.
A pragmatist with an infectious effervescence, Kamm was raised in a Wilmington suburb, in a development named Green Acres. The family home backed onto a field owned by Peco; her father paid the utility $1 a year for the right to grow tomatoes and roses. He paid Kamm a penny for every 10 weeds she dug up by the roots.
She started her high school's first recycling club and wonders now if she was meant to be born 100 years ago, "when people really lived on the land."
