THE FARM

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The Farm

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The Farm

CDS Joins National Collaboration of Stations, Independents to Harvest Family Farm Stories

Leyden, Massachusetts – November 20, 2007 – A coalition of public radio stations and independent producers in agriculturally rich regions across the country will collaborate to produce a new series of documentaries and features about the lives and work of farming families for a year-long, full cycle of the seasons beginning early 2008.

THE FARM project, funded by a major grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, will collect stories from five families, in western Massachusetts, Alabama, Iowa, northern Arizona, and central California. Collaborators on THE FARM include WFCR Amherst, Massachusetts, which also serves as home base for the project; WBHM Birmingham, Alabama; Iowa Public Radio; Native Public Media/KUYI Hopi, Keams Canyon, Arizona; Capital Public Radio, Sacramento, California; and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where series producer John Biewen is based. The resulting five full-length documentaries will be released in early 2009; a companion series of short features will be released beginning spring 2008. Executive producer and series creator Wesley Horner explains, “Most Americans know little about where their food comes from and even less about the lives of the people—farming families—who plant it, water it, feed it, pull it out of the ground or herd it, and deliver it to market. When we slice a tomato or open a box of frozen spinach, peel an orange at breakfast, order a BLT from the lunch counter around the corner from the office, or select a package of pork chops for a holiday dinner, our lives become linked to farming people who may live thousands of miles away.”

“THE FARM is about making connections for listeners between the food on their tables and the families in New England, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, and West Coast who work to produce it,” adds Horner. “When we make peanut butter sandwiches for the kids’ lunches or pour them a glass of milk, someone was at the other end of making that food. THE FARM is about the people who protected the tomato from insects, harvested the orange in a California citrus grove before a killing frost, nurtured the pig through a freezing Iowa winter, irrigated peanuts one hot afternoon in an Alabama field, milked the dairy herd in the New England predawn darkness, or whose traditions of cultivating crops in an arid desert may have much to teach us about conservation and protection of precious resources.”

“We believe farmers’ life stories are important ones to tell,” says WFCR General Manager Martin Miller, “and that all American listeners will benefit by learning in greater detail what life on the farm, raising the food we all depend on, is really like.”

“Too rarely are stories reported about farming families and what it takes to grow the food that all Americans depend on. In Iowa, most of us are at least one generation away from the farm. We’re rapidly losing our connection to rural life. If we don’t know the issues that farm families face out here in Iowa, then it’s safe to say that other Americans don’t, either,” says Todd Mundt, director of content and media for Iowa Public Radio.

Mike Morgan, General Manager of WBHM Birmingham agrees, “I grew up on a farm and know how the farm family can sacrifice, yet flourish and provide a stepping stone for future rewards. Through this series, we can put a personal face to the lives and livelihood of farmers across the country. Through THE FARM we will get to know people who work hard and for whom the benefits—including a deep understanding of the land they work—are rich.”

Capital Public Radio station manager Carl Watanabe adds, “Telling the stories of farm families is a vital extension of our collective experience and connects listeners with the country’s food gathering heritage.” Carol Pierson, president and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which brings Native Public Media and Hopi station KUYI to the collaboration writes, “To profile a Hopi farming family will highlight the important legacy of traditional farming techniques in the northeastern Arizona desert. At NFCB and Native Public Media, we believe that learning about how people create their food, and the history and culture surrounding farming, is a story that has not been adequately told.”

The only voices to be heard in THE FARM will be those of the members of each farm family. Through their own unfiltered, direct experience of daily life on a working farm, listeners will learn details of farming life and get to know each member of each family: their personal struggles, triumphs, hopes, dreams, and challenges. A young girl may tell us about her agonized decision to leave the farm for work elsewhere. An Alabama peanut farmer may tour his fields with us, talking about his decision to harvest now, or risk uncertain weather by waiting another two weeks in the hope of better prices. A young Hopi farmer may tell us about traditions developed over centuries for dry farming and crops suited to the arid, high altitude desert as we travel with him and his father to trade a harvest of blue corn with a neighboring village. A Hmong strawberry grower’s wife may tell us about the farmland she and her family left behind in Vietnam, and her adjustment to selling her family’s produce in California markets. We may talk with an Iowa farmer about the richness of country life and his hopes for his kids while he and his young sons feed their hogs.

John Biewen (series producer) has reported on social, cultural and economic issues from across the United States and in Europe, Japan, and India. Biewen was a correspondent and producer with American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Media, from the unit’s founding in 1998 until 2006. In 1997–1998, Biewen covered the Rocky Mountain West as a staff reporter for NPR News. Biewen began his career in the 1980s, covering agriculture and rural issues for Minnesota Public Radio. In 1990, Biewen co-produced Season of Discontent, a Unity-Award winning documentary on the lives of Hispanic farm workers who migrated between south Texas and northwestern Minnesota that was broadcast on Marketplace. As an NPR reporter in the West, Biewen reported on ranching and land use issues from Montana to New Mexico. In 2001, he co-produced the American RadioWorks special, “The Global Politics of Food.” Biewen has harvested onions with farm workers near Crystal City, Texas, and processed corn for four summers at a Green Giant plant in southern Minnesota.

Biewen is currently a producer, teacher, and director of the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), which has been a campus and community crossroads for people interested in the creativity, and the power, of the documentary arts since its founding at Duke University in 1989. From international awards to award-winning books, from exhibitions of new and established artists to nationally recognized training for community youth, from fieldwork projects in the U.S. to documentary fellows abroad, from university undergraduate courses to popular summer institutes, attracting students from across the country, the Center for Documentary Studies is actively engaged in sharing documentary work with a broad audience and in educating students of all ages and levels of expertise.

Wesley Horner (executive producer/series producer) has served as executive producer for Black Radio with Lou Rawls; Remembering Slavery; Jazz Singers with Al Jarreau; Mississippi: River of Song with Ani Di Franco; Folk Masters from the Barns of Wolf Trap; Memphis: Rock ‘n’ Soul with Cybill Shepherd; Jazz Smithsonian with Lena Horne; and NPR’s daily classical music program Performance Today. Horner served as producer for pilot programs for the weekly series From the Top and as consultant for development of the From the Top spin-off series for PBS; and executive producer for the HDTV PBS television special Piano Grand starring Billy Joel. In 2006 Horner was producer for NPR’s comprehensive coverage of Mozart’s 250th birthday from Salzburg, Austria, including weeklong live origination of Performance Today and segments of Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation.

Writer William MacLeish (host) is the former editor of Oceanus, a magazine of international marine science published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. MacLeish has written four books: Oil and Water: The Struggle for Georges Bank (1984); The Gulf Stream; Encounters with the Blue God (1989), the source book for a Nova television program presented by MacLeish; The Day Before America: Changing the Nature of a Continent (1994); and a memoir, Uphill With Archie; A Son's Journey (2001). MacLeish is the author of numerous articles on environmental and social issues published by Smithsonian Magazine, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the son of author Archibald MacLeish.

THE FARM is funded by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with additional support from WFCR Amherst, WBHM Birmingham, Iowa Public Radio, Native Public Media, Capital Public Radio, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

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Contact:
Wesley Horner
Wesley Horner Productions
25 Stephen Lane
Leyden, Massachusetts 01301-9405
413-772-6450
HornerProductions@isp.com

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Photograph by Christopher Sims