RE: Archetypes

A while back, I asked some of you to answer the question: "What do you imagine when you think of a farmer today?"

Here is a word cloud built from your responses:

I also build a word cloud from the website for the National Family Farm Coalition. I copied text from their mission statement and articles about key issues that they were confronting. That one looks like this:

Borders Revisited

In a previous post I talked about the significance of borders in my exploration of my father's farm. I'd like to return to that idea again and dig a little deeper. I am most interested in how we use these artificial constructs to organize and understand the world around us. In conjunction with these thoughts/reflections I have started a series of photographs of "borders" that I will update on a daily basis here.

In writing about the theories of Kant, Paul Strathern writes:

"All the things we perceive are only phenomena. The thing-in-itself (the nuomena) which supports or gives rise to these phenomena remains forever unknowable. And there is no reason why it should resemble in any way our perceptions. The phenomena are perceived by way of our categories, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the thing-in-itself. This remains beyond quality, quantity, realation, and the like."

So, I'm interested in how we use borders as a way of establishing "our categories."

Here are some of the definitions of "border" from dictionary.com that I found interesting:

bor·der [bawr-der] –noun

1. the part or edge of a surface or area that forms its outer boundary.

2. the line that separates one country, state, province, etc., from another; frontier line: You cannot cross the border without a visa.

4. the frontier of civilization.

6. brink; verge.

7. an ornamental strip or design around the edge of a printed page, a drawing, etc.

10. Theater .

a. a narrow curtain or strip of painted canvas hung abovethe stage, masking the flies and lighting units, and forming the top of the stage set.

Archetypes

What do you imagine when you think of a farmer today?

Expansion Revised

So, I felt like the previous map that showed the expansion of the gravel pit was difficult to read and didn't quite get to the gravity of the shifting borders on my father's farm.

I have created a new version of the map with color and I think it clears things up. The greens are "natural" spaces, meaning trees and grazing pastures. The browns are fields where cultivation is occurring. The yellows are the gravel pit.

Notice that, as the gravel pit expands, a higher percentage of the land is shifting to cultivated fields and the space available for free grazing is decreasing.

Borders

In my last visit to my father's farm, I became interested in the borders that exist. There are borders that exist visually between different types of crops in the fields. There are physical fences that separate cattle from fields and from each other. There are fences that define where one person's property ends and another begins. Most interesting to me is the presence of man-made hills of dirt created by the gravel pit around the perimeter of all of their mines. These "berms" have existed as long as the gravel pits have, but the recent expansion of the pits has made me more conscious of their existence. The most recent addition is this monstrous construction that separates the pit from my father's farm and from the main road that runs through town.





I imagined that these barriers served multiple purposes, specifically keeping people out and keeping people from seeing the work that was taking place inside. But there was another intended purpose for these piles that I hadn't considered. This clip from an interview with my father explains another purpose.

Expansion

This video is a composite of three aerial maps of my father's farm. The first two from 1987 and 1994 are put together from photos on file at the Farm Services Administration in Hebron, KY. The final image is captured from the current image on Google Maps. The animation shows the spread of the gravel pit as the housing boom led to increased digging. In the image in 1987, nearly 80% of the pictured land is my father's farm.