“Fields of Vision is a book filled with touching moments and simple eloquence. It finds its strength in the powerfully ordinary lives of Canadian farmers.” Harrowsmith.
“An important book, for it gives farmers a voice they have long been denied.” Globe and Mail.
Jacket Blurb:
In 1988 – a year of drought and disastrous harvests – Phil Jenkins and Ken Ginn set out in a blue van to find the easternmost farm in Canada and drive through all the intervening fields to the westernmost farm, talking to family farmers as they went. They were on a journey to discover what happens to farming – and to all of us – when the “culture" in agriculture becomes business. Like the sun, Fields of Vision rises in the east and sets in the west, and it is the story of that journey – in Jenkins’ words and Ginn’s photographs. It is a rare and delightful portrait of the people who grow the food we eat, and do so in the face of capricious weather, crippling interest rates and callous bank policies. In conversations held over kitchen tables, or in the fields as Jenkins and Ginn helped to clear away rocks or fit rafters on a new barn, the farmers talked freely. They spoke of their fierce loyalty to the land, their fights to stop the banks from foreclosing, and what the “family in the phrase “family farm” really means. And they did indeed find a vision, a stubborn vision of fields as living land, not potential real estate.
Jenkins brings to this story a wry sense of humour and a profound sympathy fro the beleaguered family farmer. His quirky sensibility and incisive turn of phrase elicit both tears and laughter as we travel the country with him, meeting those rare people who stubbornly cling to their arms out of love of the land and their work upon it. His compelling words and Ginn’s stunning photographs together give face and personality to the anonymous men and women whose efforts are too often forgotten among the aisles of Canada’s food stores.
My take.
A farmer called Cor Rook, who tilled the hard soil of the Ottawa Valley, didn’t have to think long when I asked him, “What does a farm lose when the family move off and agribusiness moves in?” A man of not many words, he answered right away. “Loyalty,” he said, and it was the answer to the question I was chasing clean across Canada. I write about our, that is Canadians’, relationship to land, and farmers have a special one. So, I wrote a travel book where the reader only meets farmers, competent land lovers surviving in a tough year. Out standing in fields or drinking killer coffee at kitchen tables we laughed
together, we cried, and I filled my barn with stories.