Windward Farm, a small Port Matilda horse farm, isn't the typical farm.

It is completely owned and operated by a small staff of young women.

In rural communities across the nation, there has been a significant increase in the number of women who have taken on more labor-intensive jobs in the field of agriculture in recent years, according to Penn State rural sociology professor Carolyn Sachs. Agriculture, until recently, was considered to consist of predominantly male workers.

Sachs said that now, more women are farming independently as opposed to working their farms with a spouse.

"Women have always been a major part of agriculture, but their work has been invisible and under-recognized," Sachs said. "However, things are changing."

Sachs said the percentage of women farmers in the United States has increased from 5 percent in 1978 to 12 percent in 2002, when the last agricultural census was taken. Some 27 percent of farmers in the United States today are women, she said.

Both the owner and the assistant manager of Windward Farm are female Penn State graduates. They have been running their horse training facility for the past five years and still have several years of horse farming ahead of them before either one of them reaches her 30th birthday.

Owner Amanda DuPont-Pauli, 27, first opened the farm, 45 minutes from its original locations in Madera, when she was 21.

The original farm belonged to her parents, who died while she was away at college.

Assistant manager and assistant trainer Andrea Graeff, 23, said many people are impressed with the way they take care of the horse farm.

"A lot of people come in and are amazed that the women run the tractors and do all of the work," Graeff said. "Our clients really like that it's all women running things. It's surely something to talk about."

Graeff said clients know that they are just as qualified to work the farm as men would be.

"We run a very reputable business," Graeff said. "They can see it from our national titles."

At Windward Farm, three women workers oversee the care of about 26 well-bred horses, which have earned them a total of over 35 national competition titles.

People come to the farm from as far away as Colorado, Maryland and Virginia to take horseback riding lessons, DuPont-Pauli said.

Nineteen-year-old Lindsey Green, a Windward employee, said there is very little difference in how women and men would run the farm.

"We get the job done, and they would get the job done," Green said. "Sometimes it can be frustrating, like when a tractor's broken and we can't fix it, but we learn to do it ourselves. Men might be able to lift more of things like hay all at once whereas we might have to go back and forth a couple times, but we still get it done."

The women at Windward said a "friendly atmosphere" would be harder to maintain if there were men there.

In fact, DuPont-Pauli said she never even thought about hiring men.

DuPont-Pauli said she didn't need to hire men to help her with her farm chores because she grew up watching her mother work the original Windward Farm without much help.

"It's always been all girls here," DuPont-Pauli said. "I just didn't want strange men around the farm. I wanted workers that I knew and could trust."