In a small field in northern Connecticut, rows of freshly-planted sprouts dance in the breeze amidst cloud-marbled skies and nearby woodlands.
Modern farming represents a fascinating blend of old and new. After all, there’s something refreshingly timeless about a quiet pasture dotted with grazing cattle or a sprawling orchard of wizened apple trees. But advances in technology and technique have also enabled farmers to be more efficient and productive than ever before.
Case in point: the use of plastic sheeting, known as “plastic mulch”, seen in this field. Covering crop rows with plastic prevents the growth of weeds and better retains moisture, meaning less field maintenance and less water usage throughout the growing season.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Virginia creeper and poison ivy climb in tangles, competing over a weathered fence post at the corner of a quiet barnyard in the south of Connecticut. Barns in the distance flank a towering concrete stave silo, likely retired from use years ago but still faithfully standing sentinel over the farm.
Silos are undoubtedly among the visual staples of farm country, but they are quickly approaching the end of their era. These unmistakable towers rose to popularity in the late 1800s as a means of preserving nutritious livestock feed for use during colder months. By the 1920s, nearly a half-million silos dotted the dairy regions of the United States.
But the purpose of the silo was to keep feed in an air-tight environment, a task accomplished far more easily these days by simply covering bunkers or feed piles in long lengths of plastic sheeting. Indeed, modern plastics have made farm life quite a bit easier, all the while tolling the death knell for the classic silo. Most of the silos that you see these days aren’t used any longer; they’ve been empty for years, in fact. Even those increasingly rare farmers who still use their silos admit that they can’t imagine ever building any new ones once the old ones are worn out and retired. It’s quite probable that within a century, the once ubiquitous silo may all but vanish from the countryside.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
With spring having arrived just about a week ago, it’s about that time for my on-going Yankee Farmlands project to make the change, as well! Next week’s addition to the series will be the first springtime farmland imagery this year. In the meantime though, I’ve released two final pieces from the very tail-end of winter.
In “Yankee Farmlands № 59” (at top), antique plows rest silently beside an elaborate, round-roof barn in Eastern Connecticut. With winter drawing to a close, the snows have melted away and soft clouds soar through the blue skies overhead.
If you were to briefly glance at this barn and expansive farm while driving by, it might be difficult to tell that it’s no longer an ordinary commercial operation. Roughly 16 years ago, the last of the previous owners donated the 170-acre farm –barns, machinery and all– for use as a unique “farm museum” where visitors can observe a broad range of both historical and modern farming equipment in use.
“Yankee Farmlands № 58” (immediately above) captures one of winter’s final blows to the Connecticut landscape. Tractor tracks impressed in frozen mud guide us past wagons and wrapped hay bales into a snowy expanse of farmland in Western Connecticut.
For all of the advancements in mechanization that have revolutionized farming over the centuries, the typical hay wagon has actually changed very little. After all, they are basically just cargo trailers for hauling hay… there’s only so much room for innovation beyond improving materials. If you could drop farmers from the early-1800s into a modern farm, machines like tractors, disc plows and balers would be completely foreign to them. Hay wagons might be among the few pieces of heavy equipment that they’d recognize fairly easily.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Against a bucolic backdrop of barns, pastureland and leafless forest, a tapped maple tree at the edge of the farm silently siphons sap into a collection bucket. Delicate clouds glide through blue skies overhead, heralding the arrival of milder weather as spring nears.
While we can’t say for certain when Native Americans living in the northeastern reaches of North America discovered the wonders of maple sap, the practice of collecting and boiling the sap down to a sweet, condensed liquid was already well-established when settlers arrived from Europe in the 1600s.
Although Canada now supplies most of the world’s maple syrup, New England remains the top-producing region in the United States. Vermont alone generates well over a million gallons each year, amounting to more than 5% of the world supply.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
The moon crests over drifting clouds as night falls on a frigid tobacco farm in the Connecticut Valley. Dormant fields, still months from being planted in the spring, spread far beyond a nearby curing shed clad in worn, mismatched boards.
The town of Windsor, which flanks the western side of the Connecticut River in the northern reaches of the state, represents a particularly unique blend of rural and developed landscapes. Turn the clock back about a century and you would find the area covered over with vast tobacco fields stretching to the horizon in every direction. Once the tobacco market began to steadily decline after the early 1900s, farmers gradually sold off large swaths of surplus cropland.
This gradual shift in land use has resulted in remaining tobacco farms being tightly intermingled with busy roads, corporate office parks and neighborhoods, maintaining an unmistakable presence in the community and hearkening back to earlier days.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Fences weave through a rock-strewn pasture in the northwest of Connecticut, converging at the crest of the nearby hill crowned with barns and silos. Clouds marble the blue sky overhead, fanning out over the dairy farm and the distant, wooded hills.
“Stones… Connecticut’s state flower!” As a child, I always had a laugh whenever my father related that classic New England joke. Of course, as I grew older and began trying to dig or drive rebar on my own property, the state’s characteristic rocky soil ceased to be a laughing matter. That was especially the case for many Connecticut farmers in earlier times: they toiled endlessly with the burdensome task of hauling stone out of their fields.
For that very reason, agricultural pursuits in particularly rugged areas of the state always tended towards livestock. Since the pastureland used for raising dairy cattle or sheep didn’t have to be plowed, it didn’t demand nearly as much meticulous stone removal.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
When author John Barber wrote of Colebrook in the 1830s, he described the land as “hilly and mountainous”, the soil as “generally stony” and the climate as “rather cold and wet”. It would be difficult to paint a bleaker picture of this village in Connecticut’s Northwest Hills. As if he felt obligated to offer at least one redeeming quality, Barber conceded that it “affords tolerable… grazing.”
In truth, Colebrook proved to be a productive area of the state for dairy farming, even if agriculture mostly vanished from its hills over the last century. Unlike many of Connecticut’s towns, which became densely populated with suburbs after farming declined, Colebrook’s abandoned pastures and hayfields were largely covered over by expansive forests. Today, less than 1,500 people make their home among its 30 square miles of remote woodlands. This barn, built in the late 1700s, and the surrounding pastureland is preserved by a local land trust and stands as something of a memorial to generations of hard-scrabble farmers that settled Colebrook long ago.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Long shadows reach across the landscape as the sun sits low upon the horizon in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley. Nestled among the shadows and vivid foliage of shade trees, a barn hoists its tall weather vane into the air atop a stately cupola.
For the first two centuries after European settlement, farmers in New England sided their barns with a single layer of long boards. This kept out rain and snow, but the narrow gaps between each board meant that the barn interior was still rather drafty. Livestock housed within needed to eat plenty of food in order to stay warm in spite of the chills. So, in the spirit of efficiency, 19th-century farmers began trying to seal the sides of their barns with shingles or additional boards, letting in less cold air so that livestock would consume less feed in the wintertime.
It worked, but there was one glaring problem: those gaps had served as much-needed barn ventilation. Without any air circulation, manure fumes grew overwhelming and the excess humidity caused rampant mold growth. Simple cupolas solved the problem, venting stale, damp air through the roof. By the late 1800s, intricate cupola designs emerged which were just as beautiful as they were functional.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Be sure to check out more work from my Yankee Farmlands project, an on-going journey through the farmlands of Connecticut in celebration of New England’s agricultural heritage.
The Housatonic Valley awakens to a chilly autumn morning as sunlight dapples the brilliant woodland canopy in the distance. Before us, cornstalks rise defiantly from a field besieged by frost; an unmistakable chill in the air foreshadows the coming winter.
But when it comes to cold New England weather, the chill in “Yankee Farmlands № 42” (above) and even the most brutal winters of the past decades can’t begin to compare to the disastrous chills of 1816… a time which would come to be remembered as the “Year Without a Summer”. Freezes killed the fruit tree blossoms in May. Come June, there were still reports of snowfall and slabs of ice drifted steadily down the Connecticut River. Frosts persisted well into August. By September, a reverend in Northern Connecticut lamented in his journal that “no person living has known so poor a crop of corn in New England… as now.” Famine engulfed the American Northeast when it became clear that there would be no harvest.
At the time, nobody could explain this perplexing weather: a day of frost in June might be followed by a day of seasonably sweltering heat, just to be followed yet again by a day of snowfall! Scientists now believe that a volcanic eruption in Indonesia had cast massive plumes of dust and ash into the Earth’s atmosphere which periodically blotted out the sunlight and caused the bewildering conditions.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Amidst the gentle hills of Watertown in Western Connecticut, the warm light of morning strikes a distant complex of barns flanked by bales of hay bound in white plastic. Quietly stationed on the hill nearby is a dump wagon and forage harvester, machinery that finds use in the autumn months when acres of spent cornstalks are cut, chipped and stored for use as wintertime livestock feed.
Most of us are familiar with hay as a staple of farm animals; we’ve all seen the round or rectangular bundles of dried grasses. But livestock is also fed “silage”, which is produced by harvesting hay, grains or chopped cornstalks and quickly storing them in an air-tight environment to ferment. Farmers in the north use this silage to provide their livestock with moist, nutritious feed even during a frigid winter when the fields are frozen over.
Traditionally, fermented feed was produced by storing fresh-cut greens in tall silos (thus the term “silage”), but advances in durable plastics have largely made silos obsolete in modern times. Farmers now have machinery which can wrap individual hay bales in plastic, essentially creating small, self-contained silos that are easy to access and transport. Similar plastic is used to cover silage that can’t be baled, such as chipped cornstalks, which are collected in long heaps on the ground and tightly covered.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Dawn breaks over farmland in Western Connecticut on a humid summer morning. A bale elevator is perched silently at the open door of a barn overlooking woodlands in the valley below which glow with a luminous mist as sharply-angled sunlight pierces the canopy.
Photographing agricultural landscapes can occasionally be tricky, for unlike the wildlands that I shoot, farms are essentially private, man-made landscapes where the presence of a photographer wandering around in the wee hours of the morning is not always welcome. But from time to time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with farmers that seem to understand intimately what draws photographers such as myself to their fields, rolling pastures and rustic barns.
Much like landscape photography, farming in New England generally isn’t easy or particularly lucrative work: farmers do it because they love it. They appreciate being on the land and being attuned with seasonal rhythms. A Connecticut tobacco farmer once explained that farming “isn’t a job, it’s a life.” That brand of passion, commitment and sincerity could just as easily explain the fervor with which the most dedicated landscape photographers approach their art.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Giant sunflowers crowd a verdant field in Connecticut’s Eastern Uplands as sprawling clouds drift across the summertime sky. The vista featured in “Yankee Farmlands No. 34” (above) is the latest installment in my project which celebrates the agricultural heritage of Southern New England through Connecticut’s scenic farmlands.
Among North America’s ancient food crops, the sunflower was widely cultivated by Native Americans for at least 4,000 years before Spanish explorers first laid eyes on the plant in the 1500s. Specimens were brought back home to Spain and, from there, spread throughout Europe.
Russia can be credited with breeding the gargantuan sunflowers with which we are familiar today. But while sunflowers had grown popular in Europe, they had fallen out of vogue as crops in North America. So even though sunflowers began their journey as food crops thousands of years ago in the Americas, the modern practice of farming them in the United States didn’t really take off until Russia shipped their huge sunflowers overseas in the late 1800s.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
