WALES – Clarinda Andrews went to junior college to be a secretary in 1947, but out in the workforce she didn’t enjoy being a secretary. She wanted to farm.

She moved to Maine from Rhode Island and met her future husband. They ran a small dairy for nearly five decades until he died in 1998.

“You’ve got to be really dedicated to it,” Andrews, 75, said. “You can’t want all these fancy things. I always thought it was a good life.”

More women are after that.

One out of every three farmers in Maine is a woman, according to preliminary results of the 2002 Census of Agriculture.

Women are the principle operators – owners or bosses or going solo – at 1,560 farms.

That’s up 35 percent from 1997, the last count.

Maine gained the most female farmers in New England. Their numbers declined in Vermont, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

A lot of farming today is about finding a niche, says Amy LeBlanc. Hers: heirloom vegetable specialist. She grows seedlings in Wilton.

People go heirloom for all sorts of reasons: flavor, texture, juiciness, sweetness or depth of flavor, LeBlanc said. She doesn’t ship her seedlings, so people drive from all over New England to pick them up. She likes meeting all those people.

“We’ve always grown things, my family and my husband’s family,” said Grace Firth of Firth Fruit Farm in New Sharon. “What’s not to love about blueberries?”

She planted high bush berries on her farm about 25 years ago. But like LeBlanc, the farm isn’t her only job. Both women are teachers.

In the Census, under half of the women who listed themselves as principle operators reported farming as their primary occupation. More than 900 worked some time off the farm.

“We have young farmers coming in, we have widowed farmers now doing it on their own and we have a lot of women of all ages” who are farming as a second job or retiring and turning to farming, said Vivianne Holmes, director of the Women’s Agricultural Network and an educator with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.

Holmes said WAgN members were pushed to make sure they got counted in the Census this time around. In past years only one person on each farm got counted, that person often being a man. This year, information was taken on each farm’s top three decision-makers.

But aside from new counting standards, “we’re seeing more women farmers no matter what,” Holmes said. “I think women, just on a gut level, they appreciate being stewards of the land. It puts them back to the earth.”

Other New England data also in the Census:

• Average farm size grew in each state.

• Maine has the most farms, with 7,213.

• Maine was the only state to gain farmland in the last five years.

Detailed crop information won’t be out until summer.

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