Fertile Ground

When we moved to California in 1989, we were drawn to the incredibly lush u-pick fields of strawberries, olallieberries, raspberries and boysenberries just a short drive from our home in Palo Alto. Over the years we added regular trips to cherry, apple, apricot and peach orchards with an amazing array of varieties still within an hour of our home. We instinctively knew the productivity of these fields were 10X that of the fields we had seen in Wisconsin and New York.

Fertile Ground has since become a multi year photographic project which pays homage to California’s 77,000 extraordinarily productive “factories in the field”, fields that supply two-thirds of America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts. The fields look magical: geometries of light and dark with arrays of nascent seedlings, peeking through plastic pathways or hidden in hoop houses, along irrigated hillsides bathed in coastal fog that operate 11 months of the year. In the tradition of New Topographics, these bucolic and yet hyper functional landscapes raise difficult questions about our shared future, particularly now amidst charged debates on migrant labor, water allocation and pesticide use, as well as climate change. A commitment to continuous experimentation, so intrinsic to nearby Silicon Valley, gives us all reason to hope that we can maintain and even grow ever more affordable and sustainable supplies of fresh produce and fruit.