Photo Essay: Making Sustainable Farming Sustainable

Editor's note: this photo essay is a follow-up to Rachel Leventhal's audio documentary Searching for Farming's Future in Its Past, presented as an OnEarth Podcast in September 2007. We're thrilled to note that the piece was recently chosen by the Third Coast International Audio Festival as a winner of a 2008 "Best Documentary" award.

Last year, while working on a series of features about the impact individuals can make on their world, I spent a couple of days at Jonathan and Nina White's Bobolink Dairy farm in Vernon, New Jersey. Lindsay Klaunig, a 23-year-old intern, is one of the people I met there; drawn to Bobolink by its reputation as a cutting-edge experiment in sustainable agriculture, she is one of a new generation of farmers searching for new models that will sustain us into the next century on a groaning, overpopulated planet. But instead of answers, she’s finding that our current practices are so labor-intensive that her body may not sustain her for six more months, let alone the rest of her life.

Related

» Listen to Searching for Farming's Future in Its Past
» Read And On Your Left a Grass-Fed Cow, from OnEarth Magazine's Fall 2007 issue