The Stories - a synopsis
What Will Be in the Fields Tomorrow? is the question many farmers ask today. There are so many external forces—energy costs, changing life styles, temptations for young people to work elsewhere, rising land values. . .
Imagine a widow, feeling her age as she turns seventy-five, committed to the farm she and her husband have cared for during good times and bad. What should she do now? What about her customers who value her naturally grown foods? Who should influence the future of this land?
Fields raises these questions and many more through vignettes between two older women, life long friends, and a host of farmers from around the country. Performers and audience together explore:
- Sustainability – what is it, what it isn’t, what it means, and how it works.
- AG Workers Monologue – can a fresh AG. Ph.D. face all the issues, histories, acronyms and anxieties of modern farming movements without getting eaten alive? A sweetly comic look at an eager young professional’s first mission.
- A Farmer’s Vacation – what farmers do for fun and what they don’t do.
- Working for Food – what work is for farmers and how work and barter serve the sustainable agriculture world.
- Money Talk – What’s money got to do with it? In hard times, good times, all times, you cannot escape the money questions.
- Bigger than Just Me – spiritual dimensions of working on the land.
- “I Didn’t think I’d Make it!.” – several voices sharing their experiences of getting through the worst times —drought, money crises—and how they did it.
- Thinking about the Future – young voices asking questions about big issues.
