Between Planting and Picking - Sandi Haber Fifield photograph © Sandi Haber Fifield

Life on a small farm can be reflective and beautiful. Each season provides a new canvas for natures art combined with a farmers influence.

The end of winter can be trying as the final fits of snow and weather delays the birth of spring. Appreciation of the landscape can be overshadowed by daily chores, worries, and an endless list of things to mend as nature takes its annual toll.

And when I received Sandi Haber Fiflield’s “Between Planting and Picking” photo book in the mail, I was treated to an artful, reflective view of small farm life that allowed me to pause and enjoy her images.

Haber Fifield has found the hidden beauty of  small farms and shares 54 artful images of the time between the promises of spring and the reward of autumn’s harvest.  These are fresh images, most likely familar to the farmer and new to the non farmer.   These scenes are captured from spaces reserved for those who work and relish the work of the land.

The images are best viewed in print, a computer screen can only do them so much justice and the book is a sample of the  gallery show which opens March 3 and runs through April 16 at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City.

Queen Anne’s lace and parked truck, Nelsen Family Farm, Kerbyville, OR, August 2010 © Sandi Haber Fifield

Haber Fifield’s project began in June 2009 and continued through the fall of 2010. The artist photographed family owned farms spanning New England to the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest. Teeming with the verdant and lush colors of these fertile fields, Haber Fifield made pictures that delicately balance the geographic with the geometric, while using the agricultural landscape to create a complex vocabulary of visual associations. Less documentary in nature and more about challenging her own vision, she finds in the unending cycle of growth and harvest a metaphor for her own image-making.

The monograph includes essays by Dominique Browning and Leslie K. Brown.  Their insight and discussion of the images  put  words to the feelings and emotions captured by Haber Fifield’s work.

Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA writes of the book, “Here are pictures of small farms, where food is grown with integrity, and of simple places that are beautiful because of the work that is done there.”

Harvested pumpkins, Belta’s Farm, Westport, CT, October 2010 © Sandi Haber Fifield

As I turned the pages, I found Haber Fifield’s images combining the order and chaos of a field:  a collection of tools, an improvised electrical box, or tools and chairs, as if the inanimate objects were patiently awaiting their owner’s return.

Her images take the viewer to private places: images of a journal/lunar calendar, a solo goose bathing in a tank, behind-the-scenes wash rooms, and laundry blowing in the wind.  There are no people in the collection, yet their influence is shown and felt with the turn of each page.

Many of the images also include barriers: fencing, crop netting, and make-shift backstops.In real life, these barriers  keep out predators and protect crops  and livestock. In the photographs, they serve to keep the troubles of the rest of the world at bay, while the viewer enjoys the art of the small farm.

“We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.”

via Street Farmer – NYTimes.com.

via Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Vegetable Garden – NYTimes.com.

I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like venison or cardoons. I have nothing against good grass-fed beef or a head of lettuce, it’s just that others are doing just fine writing about those foods. I’m trying to walk a less-traveled path.

For those who enjoy eating pheasant, his blog post offers terrific insight into the pros and cons of hanging the birds first.

Enter the pheasant. A pheasant really is a “ditch chicken.” It is a close cousin of the domestic chicken and when eaten fresh has, as Brillat-Savarin puts it in his The Physiology of Taste, ”nothing distinguishing about it. It is neither as delicate as a pullet, nor as savorous as a quail.” Those who have eaten fresh pheasant — and by fresh I mean un-hung — can’t help but thinking: “So what? This just seems like a slightly tough and slightly gamy chicken.” They’re correct, especially with farm-raised birds or those shot at a game preserve.

Hanging Game Birds – How to Hang a Pheasant | Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

This desire is one of the main reasons farmers’ markets are increasing, up some 300 in the two years between August 2006 and 2008, as the total number surpassed 4,500 according to the US Department of Agriculture. And it’s helping sustain about 750 farmers’ markets that operate between the months of November and March.

via Eat local – even in winter | csmonitor.com.

The sustainable local food system we are trying to build relies on an abundance of small, diverse, sustainable family farmers scattered all across the United States. For this kind of farm to exist, sustainable must mean more than environmental sustainability – it must also include economic viability. Farming is a dangerous and risky business, and it becomes a whole lot less attractive when a farmer knows that he or she is one fall from the hay loft away from losing their land.
While 9 in 10 farm and ranch operators have health insurance, nearly one-quarter (23%) report that insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket health care costs are causing financial difficulties for themselves and their families.
Respondents who reported financial problems spent on average 42 percent of their income on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health care costs.
In addition, more than four in 10 farmers and ranchers (44%) report spending at least 10 percent of their annual income on health insurance premiums, prescriptions and other out-of-pocket medical costs.

Growing Healthy Food Requires Health Care | Center for Rural Affairs.