Arts project to record farm crisis

23 March 2001



Arts project to record farm crisis

By FWi staff

MORE than 100 photographers, film-makers, writers and artists have pledged their support for a project to record the crisis on Britains farms.

It is launched in London on Thursday (20 March) by the Hill Farming Initiative (HFI), the Small and Family Farms Alliance and the arts group Projects Environment.

It is backed by the Arts Council, the National Farmers Union and other leading farming, local and regional arts organisations.

HFI spokesman Alistair Davy said he hoped the five-year project would create a true record which reflected the radical changes in rural Britain.

“One of the difficulties facing farmers is getting wider realisation of what is actually happening in the countryside at grassroots level.”

The idea was inspired by a successful eight-year project that documented the suffering of US farmers driven from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Pictures such as Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother have since become world famous.