Check Out These Throwback Black-and-White Photos of Organic Farmers
Check Out These Throwback Black-and-White Photos of Organic Farmers
2 minute read
A former artist, Regan gave up painting in 1998 to grow salad greens at Sky Farm outside Millerton, NY. On eleven acres, he raises everything from familiar lettuces to more exotic leaves like borage and micro-amaranth. Unlike most other small farmers, he leases his land, rather than own it, and he sells almost exclusively to restaurants. He has always farmed organically, calling it the “honest’ thing to do.Francesco Mastalia
You know organic food has hit its moment when it gets its own version of baseball cards. In photographer Francesco Mastalia’s book Organic, the Hudson Valley farmers who raise their plants and animals without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers, and the chefs who cook with and celebrate their produce, get the star treatment.
The geographic focus makes sense: Because of both its rich farming history and its proximity to New York City, the Hudson Valley is one of the country’s hot spots for organic and farm-to-table agriculture. But it’s the dreamy portraits in this book, accompanied by brief texts from their subjects explaining what “organic” means to them (many of them have rejected the official certification offered by the USDA), that really stand out.
Mastalia uses a 19th-century process called wet-plate collodion that allows him, as Gail Buckland puts it in her introduction, “to make photographs the same way photographers did 150 years ago” just as “the farmers in the book are growing vegetables and raising cattle the way their forebears did 150 years ago.”
That sepia-tinged approach may ignore some the innovations and forward-thinking that characterizes much of the best organic farming and cooking, but for anyone who likes their locally-grown, pesticide-free carrots with a dusting of nostalgia, Organic is tasty indeed.
A former artist, Regan gave up painting in 1998 to grow salad greens at Sky Farm outside Millerton, NY. On eleven acres, he raises everything from familiar lettuces to more exotic leaves like borage and micro-amaranth. Unlike most other small farmers, he leases his land, rather than own it, and he sells almost exclusively to restaurants. He has always farmed organically, calling it the “honest’ thing to do.
Francesco MastaliaAt his farm in Goshen, New York, Wyatt raises 800 merino sheep for both meat and wool (the richly colored yarn are dyed on the farm). The poetry he posts on his blog reveals a love of language, which helps explain why although he farms organically—he no longer seeks the government’s certification for doing so. “I rescinded my [organic] certification two years after the USDA took over,” he says. “I don’t like the word now because it’s branding.” Francesco MastaliaWhile running a storefront law office dedicated to progressive causes in the 1970s, Jones worked with labor and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, which gave him one of his earlier experiences in the field. Now he supplies dozens of New York restaurants, and runs a CSA, with the 300 varieties of herbs and vegetables he grows at Bloominghill Farm. “One of the benefits of organic is
that I don’t have to ride a sprayer,” he says. “There’s no farmer in the world that wakes up the morning and says, ‘Oh boy I get to spray today.’
Francesco MastaliaAs a child, Bail swore she would escape the dairy farming life of her German parents. But it was too deep in her blood. After stints in Germany, California, and Canada, she landed in the Hudson Valley, where she and her partner raise cows and fruit on Threshold Farm’s 45 biodynamic acres. “I hope I die like my father died,” she says. “Right up in that barn, throwing hay out. That’s a beautiful way to go, with your animals around you.” Francesco MastaliaTogether with his partner Laura Nywening, Uhler founded Peace and Carrots farm just over a year ago. But its roots go much further back: it fills a tiny corner of a dairy farm that Nywening’s family has owned for now four generations. In its first year, Peace and Carrots remains a tiny operation—just a green house that the two built from a kit, and and acre and a half for the vegetables they sell through a CSA (community supported agriculture). Francesco MastaliaAfter growing up on a conventional farm, Bialas switched to organic only because, when it came time to start his own J&A Farm in Goshen, NY, he couldn’t afford to buy chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But he and his wife Adina quickly realized they didn’t need them: the roughly 200 varieties they grow—everything from arugula and tomatillos to collards and popcorn—sell quickly at the farmers’ markets, through CSAs, and to acclaimed restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Francesco MastaliaAnother escapee from conventional farming, Bolluyt grew up in Iowa, where she spent summers detassling corn, and helping her uncle with his 1500-acre soybean farm. Now she raises vegetables and livestock organically with her Dutch-born partner Jean-Paul Courtens. “There used to be small farms there,” she says of Iowa. “Then they all closed and we lost a lot of the community that we used to have. After seeing what happened to the landscape, I didn’t really want to go back to the old ways of farming." Francesco Mastalia
![At his farm in Goshen, New York, Wyatt raises 800 merino sheep for both meat and wool (the richly colored yarn are dyed on the farm). The poetry he posts on his blog reveals a love of language, which helps explain why although he farms organically—he no longer seeks the government’s certification for doing so. “I rescinded my [organic] certification two years after the USDA took over,” he says. “I don’t like the word now because it’s branding.”](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/eugene-wyatt-organic.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
