Farm Together Now

Description

We want to change the way the food system works. We want to know who else here has good ideas about how to do it. This part-travelogue, part-oral history, part-creative exploration of food politics will introduce readers to twenty people working in agriculture and sustainable food production and twenty farm-fresh foods from across the US. Throughout 2009 the authors will visit twenty farms from coast to coast, talking to farmers about their engagement in sustainable food production, public policy and community organizing efforts. Additionally, a single variety of food produced on each farm will be the subject of an investigation into the history of growing, eating and selling that particular food throughout time. The colorfully illustrated book will be introduced with a historical account of farming by a guest author, and will be accompanied by a supplementary website. It is our hope that by example this book will inspire and cultivate a new wave of agrarians. Half of the authors profits will be put into a fund to encourage like-minded documentary and folklore projects.

Amy Franceschini Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer living in San Francisco, CA. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She creates websites, installations and public programs that provide platforms to collectively question or challenge this divide. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists and designers. Futurefarmers hosts an artist in residency that has hosted over 22 artists from 12 countries and forms the basis of a distributed network of artists who make up the collective. In 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, and researchers who work together to propose alternatives to the current social, political and environmental organization of space. Her individual and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at the Zentrum Kunst Media in Karlsruhe Germany, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting faculty in the graduate program at the California College of the Arts. futurefarmers.com Anne Hamersky: Photographer Anne Hamersky's portrait and documentary work has appeared in many publications including LIFE, Time Magazine, Saveur, Mother Jones and National Geographic Traveler. Her book credits include Expectations: Thirty Women Talk About Becoming a Mother (Chronicle Books). Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including Moving Walls, at the Soros Foundation in New York, Motherhood is Not a Class Privilege at Birmingham, Alabama's Civil Rights Institute, Muse at the Oakland Museum, and Women Photographers at FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic. In 2002, she began focusing on agricultural issues, reporting for Sierra Magazine on food security in South Central Los Angeles, immigrant gardens in Fresno and sustainable farming in Nebraska. In 2007, she created Sky in the Pie, an interactive public mural series about the rural-urban connection in the Bay Area. Hamersky first collaborated with Amy Franceschini by doing portraits for the Victory Garden 2008+ project. While traveling 13,000 miles and photographing the farmers and activists in this book, Hamersky has deepened her understanding of how people in the United States are creating change within our food system today. Anne lives in San Francisco, where she swims in the Bay without a wetsuit. annehamersky.com. Daniel Tucker : Daniel Tucker works as an organizer and documenter with a focus primarily on space, place and the cultural and social movements that define them. From 2005-2010 he edited the biannual journal and discussion series AREA Chicago: Art/Research/Education/Activism, releasing 10 readers on themes related to culture and politics in Chicago. His writings have appeared in books like Chicago Journal, H-Art (Belgium), Clamor, Proximity (Chicago), BootPrint (St. Louis), the Journal of Northeast Issues (Hamburg) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (LA). In 2008 he co-organized an interview project with 100 politically-engaged artists living in Chicago, LA, New York City, Baltimore and New Orleans for 'Democracy In America' a project by the public art organization Creative Time. When not documenting social and cultural movements, chatting it up and learning with others, he roasts fair-trade coffee on a grill, lives and eats in the northwest side of Chicago. miscprojects.com

My favorite book of the season is Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement, by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker. It consists of interviews with a wide range of farmers (and activists) who you haven't heard of. Inspiring without being romantic in the least, it advances the whole conversation about sustainable agriculture and access. -- Michael Pollan, Grist.org