Claudia Schmidt, assistant professor of marketing and local/regional food systems Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and NERCRD faculty affiliate, is the recipient of the college’s 2022 Roy C. Buck Faculty Award, which recognizes the best article accepted or published by a refereed scholarly journal in the social sciences within the past two years.

Schmidt’s paper, titled “Female farmers in the United States: Research needs and policy questions,” examines the importance and unique characteristics of U.S. female farmers, and also draws attention to the lack of economic research into women farmers in the United States and the need for more related economic and policy analysis. The article, published in Food Policy, was co-authored with NERCRD Director Stephan Goetz and NERCRD Postdoctoral Scholar Zheng Tian.

Using data from the U.S. Census of Agriculture from 2002-2017, Schmidt and her NERCRD colleagues developed a statistical model to examine the relationship between a county’s share of female-operated farms and the conditions in the county. Their goal was to shed light on aspects of the local economic and agricultural ecosystems that are most strongly associated with female-owned farms. Their study can be found here.