Tolkkinen: Minnesota’s first-ever LGBTQ farming conference? Cue the online vitriol

As soon as the University of Minnesota announced the state’s first-ever LGBTQ farming conference on social media, it had to restrict the comment section.

People from Minnesota and around the United States were mocking it.

“And this is why other countries are laughing at us,” wrote a Mankato man in what was one of the safer comments for a family-friendly news organization.

“Great use of taxpayer money U of M!! Another reason not to donate anymore,” a woman from Braham, Minn., commented.

I too blinked at the university’s announcement. What on earth does gender or sexual identity have to do with farming? You figure out your markets, get your seed in the ground, hope for a good year, and sell what you harvest.

But the beautifully awesome thing about being curious in today’s world is you don’t simply have to judge people and forget about them. You can find out what their motivation is. All that information is available right on Mama Internet. Plug in queer farming and you can find out all sorts of reasons why the university might want to schedule such a conference.

Here’s what I learned during my search.

No. 1: I’m late to the game. Queer farmers have already been written up in Modern Farmer, one of the key publications for those in agriculture.

No. 2: The land doesn’t judge. If you’re LGBTQ, just being out in society means you might get harassed. Yesterday a transgender person was telling me about a scary experience being followed by neighbor men on an ATV. But the land can be a refuge. Cattle don’t judge. You can work with the soil and be your absolute truest self.

No. 3: If you identify as anything other than straight, you might have been cut out of the line of farming succession because your family has disowned you.

No. 4: If you’re LGBTQ and go to a standard farming conference, you might find yourself amid people who think you shouldn’t exist. The American Farm Bureau Federation, which says it represents nearly 6 million people and has offices in every state and Puerto Rico, prominently rejects same-sex unions in its 2024 policy handbook, saying that marriage should be between one man and one woman.

No. 5: Farming can be lonely. A farmer can operate a thousand acres on their own nowadays given all the modern equipment that does the job of an entire crew. You could go a day or a week without talking to another person. It’s important for all farmers to spend time with others, but LGBTQ farmers might feel alienated from their neighbors and need to find support elsewhere.

I don’t want to leave you with the idea that being a queer person in agriculture is a sad, lonely existence. There’s a revolutionary side to LGBTQ farming. There’s a sector that not only embraces LGBTQ identities, but wants to “queer farming,” using “queer” as a verb that means to shake up the traditional world of farming.

No more monocropping, or growing thousands of acres of just one crop, which kills biodiversity. No more hauling in trailer loads of commercial fertilizer because the land is depleted of nutrients. They want to build up the soil. They want to pay their workers a living wage. They embrace regenerative agriculture. They want to transform the world of farming, which is almost entirely white in the U.S. and predominantly male, into one that welcomes people of all kinds.

That aspiration led to the AgForAll hashtag created by Emily Krekelberg, an extension educator in farm safety and health, and who is one of the conference organizers. She believes this is not just the first LGBTQ farming conference in Minnesota, but in the nation.

“We are really excited and honored to be doing this conference,” Krekelberg said. “The idea is just a regular conference but one that feels a little bit more inviting to them.”

For every internet critic, they’ve heard from people who want to know when registration begins (December) so they can sign up, Krekelberg told me. The conference itself is in March.

A lot of the discussions will be aimed at beginning farmers. That means attendees will get to learn about grazing rotation, forming relationships with lenders, sorting through crop insurance and the myriad federal farm programs. But there’ll also be a chance to talk about experiences as queer farmers with other queer farmers. They’ll get to bond and feel less alone.

And, you know, farming is awfully hard to get into. It’s expensive to buy land and the equipment needed to farm efficiently. As the older generation of farmers retire, we’re going to need younger people to replace them. So I say welcome to all the newcomers, including nonwhite people, women and LGBTQ folks. Welcome to all of you. Maybe your ideas will solve some of the thorny issues we have with modern agriculture. Maybe together you will queer farming.