Grassland Farm Photos

Photos from Wood Prairie Farm

Great day at Wood Prairie Farm!

Had a fantastic day at Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, Maine! In total, I think I spent about 5 hours on the road, but it was absolutely worth the journey up North. There were so few cars on the road that, at times, I felt as if I was the last person on earth. What welcomed me in Bridgewater was a lovely, small farm off a dirt road – quietly nestled in the surrounding landscape.

Jim Gerritson and his family have been offering high quality organic products for the past twenty years. Jim kindly took a few hours yesterday afternoon to talk to me about how he got into farming, what he enjoys most about it, and what his hopes are for the future of agriculture in Maine. He also gave me a quick tour of the farm. I am very thankful for his time and expertise.

Sign greeting visitors to Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, Maine

On the ride home, I was a witness to an awesome sunset that was truly spectacular with the addition of fantastic view of Mt. Katahdin.

Reading List

I’ve started thinking about the media to add to my reading list. In no particular order, here are some ideas:

Books:
- The Great Gatsby
- Winesbury, Ohio
- 1984
- Animal Farm
- The Bell Jar
- The Killer Angels

Speeches:
- Gettysburg Address
- I Have A Dream

Songs / Albums:
- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

Art:
- Las Meninas by Velazquez

Building upon communication

With the ultimate goal of this project being the facilitation of face-to-face communication between farmers and consumers, I have to look at how to involve consumer input in the system I intend to build.
To start my brainstorming, I began to look at my own needs as a consumer. Immediately, what came to mind, is that I am unfamiliar with the local farmers around me. However, even with the unfamiliarity, I am interested in purchasing foods locally. Clearly, the old sales model between seller and buyer doesn’t work for marketing locally grown food. Typical of the current system is that buyers go to a market with their lists of items and choose from the selection. I got to thinking about this… what if sellers were able to come to me?
As an example, let’s say I want to buy eggs from local, organic farms. However, I have no idea what farms sell eggs. Therefore, I am resigned to going to the grocery store and shopping in the organic isle or stopping by a farmer’s market on the chance that there would be a farmer there selling eggs.
What if I built a system where buyers could post their grocery lists, and other buyers / farmers could recommend where / how to get each of the items. Given my example, I would post “eggs” to my list, and perhaps someone might see that and recommend a farm. Else, a hen farmer could be notified of a potential customer in his or her local area and could contact me directly.
The systems clearly would be a social network for local food… one not created to promote a specific farm, but a specific group of individuals within a geographic area.

Maine Food Map

The thesis has taken another turn…
My overall goal is to facilitate face to face communication between small scale food producers and local consumers. Critical to this effort is the fact that face-to-face communication is an alternating process. The people involved in the communication alternate between speaker and listener (I know, elemental stuff here).
In order to facilitate this type of communication, the ease of communication between both parties must be met.

Therefore, a simple website where a farmer can list produce available for sale only reflects half of the communication equation. What about the visitor to this sort of site? How can he or she participate?

Also, besides looking at the communication strategy, I have also looked at the premise of my goal of facilitating face-to-face communication; the issues impeding face-to-face communication.

So, what impedes communication? The answer: a lot of things. The list of barriers are as follows:
Time
Distance
Location
Language
Socio / Cultural
Availability
Desire to communicate
Openness of pathways for communication
etc.

The first step in defining my project will be to evaluate the current status of face-to-face communication between farmers and consumers, find the problems, and design a project to overcome these issues.

Food with a Face

Finally, I’ve come up with a project description for my thesis / New Media capstone!

In a 2006 address to a Slow Food assembly Jim Gerritsen, a potato farmer in Aroostook County, comments on the disappearance of small-scale potato farms from northern Maine. According to Mr. Gerritsen, a growing trend in agriculture is one that favors large-scale food production,

“One economist has projected that if current trends continue, Maine’s 60,000 acres of potatoes will one day be grown by just 20 farmers each growing 3,000 acres”.

The trend in the potato farming industry is widespread; New England has lost two-thirds of its dairy farms in the past 20 years.

The loss of family farms in Maine, according to Mr. Gerritsen, is due to trends in the marketplace. Large grocery store chains are stocking food regardless of growing season; consumers expect to be able to buy blueberries in the middle of February. This factor, of the ability to buy produce regardless of season, has pushed the wholesale market to favor large producers in moderate climates that can provide a variety of foods to one grocery store chain; “..they [grocery stores] just don’t want to mess around with local growers that can provide broccoli 3 months out of the year – they want one farmer to stock their stores year-round”. The future, according to Mr. Gerritsen, is in retail – of farmers directly selling their produce and food products directly to consumers; it’s what he calls “food with a face”.

Mr. Gerritsen has outlined three critical elements necessary to market the food produced and manufactured by Maine’s small scale farmers, (i) authenticity, (ii) facilitating relationships between farmer and consumer, (iii) education. With these three critical elements in mind, and others that may develop from additional research, my thesis will explore the role of new media in promoting family farms and other small-scale food manufacturers and producers in the state of Maine.

Already second-guessing…

Already second guessing my thesis topic. I looked online, and there are already a number of Maine sites about storytelling – the best of which is the Maine Memory Network. I love how you can search for photos, and then leave comments about them. I think that is a fantastic feature. You can also create your own album of images and even upload some of your own to be included in the directory. The project idea that I had in mind very closely resembles what this site is already doing. I suppose I could build up on this site and make it even better… but I was really hoping to do something that wasn’t already done. I feel like I have to brainstorm more (and better) ideas.

Finally… a thesis statement

I’ve been able to put those notes together to form a thesis statement. Here’s what I have:

Storytelling is a uniquely human trait, no other species on Earth tells stories. Throughout history, the act of storytelling has changed in response to the development of new technologies – from cave paintings to sculpture (and other art forms) to the printing press to photography to TV & film to the Internet (just to name a few). Besides changing the delivery method, these technological advances have changed the nature of storytelling.
In face-to-face storytelling, stories are as much about the content as they are with the environment. Stories can change as they are told among generations of listeners. However, as stories are increasingly delivered via fixed mediums – such as books, TV & film, the element of change is lost.

Photography is one technology that storytellers use to tell stories. The word “photography” is derived from the Greek words for “light” and “writing”. Since the first photograph, taken over 150 years ago, cameras have become ubiquitous in our society; in one minute, over 5,000 photographs are uploaded to Flickr, an online photo gallery.

What role does photography play in storytelling? Furthermore, can it be enhanced in order to preserve some of the original elements of the art of storytelling? What impact does the Internet and other computer technologies have regarding photography & storytelling? These questions are just a few of what will be explored in my Capstone project.

Thesis Statement – context

In the broad sense, I have narrowed my topic to establish that I want to explore storytelling through visual audible information. In order to formulate a decent thesis statement, I did some research to obtain some context in order to frame my project.

First, I looked into storytelling. A few quick notes:
- storytelling is uniquely human, no other species on earth tells stories
- the storytelling medium has changed throughout human history in response to new technologies – from cave paintings to oral histories to the printing press to TV & film to the Internet (just to name a few).
- the medium of storytelling transmission impacts the story. For instance, oral storytelling can morph as generations of individuals interpret and tell the stories to younger generations. The ability for change is limited in printed formats and for TV & film, with the production of fixed mediums.
-What does the internet hold for the future of storytelling? Will it support/increase the migration of storytelling to fixed mediums, or not?

Then I looked into photography:
-the term “photography” comes from the Greek words for “light” and “writing”
- the first photo taken required an exposure of 8 hours in 1826
-photography was available to the mass market in 1901
-as of the writing of these notes, roughly 15,000 images were uploaded to Flickr (5,000 per minute per average)