Join us on Thursday, June 17th for a Summer Film Screening at the Field of Dreams Drive-In Theater in Liberty Center, OH.
We’ll be screening two films that explore our relationship with the land:
- Farmscape Ecology
- Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
Gates will open at 8:30 pm; movies begin at dusk. Concessions will be available for purchase. The screening is free and open to the public. Donations to Black Swamp Conservancy are appreciated and can be made online here.
About the Films
Farmscape Ecology explores the interface between farming and wild nature. Farming is ever evolving. Today, when we think about what is to come next for farmers, a key question is, “How do we produce food and maintain a livelihood for farmers while respecting the needs of other organisms with which we share the land?” As part of the Hudson Valley Farm Hub’s Applied Farmscape Ecology Research Collaborative, a team of ecologists, herpetologists, microbiologists, ornithologists, hydrologists, and farmers are examining this very question. Farmscape Ecology follows this unique collaborative as they work to discover how farming and wildlife can co-exist and how they can contribute to each other’s success.
Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry examines the changing landscapes and shifting values of rural America in the era of industrial agriculture, as seen through the mind’s eye of farmer, writer, and activist Wendell Berry. In 1965, Berry returned home to Henry County, where he bought a small farmhouse and began a life of farming, writing and teaching. This lifelong relationship with the land and community would come to form the core of his prolific writings. A half century later Henry County, like many rural communities across America, has become a place of quiet ideological struggle. In the span of a generation, the agrarian virtues of simplicity, land stewardship, sustainable farming, local economies and rootedness to place have been replaced by a capital-intensive model of industrial agriculture characterized by machine labor, chemical fertilizers, soil erosion and debt – all of which have frayed the fabric of rural communities. Writing from a long wooden desk beneath a forty-paned window, Berry has watched this struggle unfold, becoming one of its most passionate and eloquent voices in defense of agrarian life.