THE FARMERS AMONG US

IN a month’s time, it’ll be time for us to fly back.

Even before we realized, the fellowship program is coming to an end. As we welcome September, I am in a mood to look back.

This Sunday marked the culmination of the project I worked for all of summer in South Florida – the story ‘farmers among us’ finally hit the covers of Outlook section.

Read what my mentor and Editorial Page editor Antonio Fins said (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/sfl-afcol-intro-outlook-083009sbaug30,0,358803.column) in his intro to the Sun Sentinel’s Sunday Outlook section that he and his team of editorial writers produce with distinction.

Last 15 days – I worked, re-worked and re-re-worked the content of this story, as I approached the finish-line. From the initially written piece of 5000 words, the final story stood at a little over 1400 words, inclusive of tag-lines, credit lines etc. We finished off with the sound-slides and tightening up the loose ends by the weekend of 23rd. The layout was done by August 26th and pages were ready by Thursday, the 27th.

How it all was put together, I will explain it in a while.

What did it mean to me? Fulfillment of several of my program goals – writing tight, learning multi-media tricks and, above all, focusing on agriculture.

I did a quick joint byline story last Friday with a colleague on how the expatriate community from my home state of Maharashtra celebrates the annual Ganesh festival in South Florida. (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/sfl-elephant-god-b082709,0,2978036.story).

Saturday, August 29, I attended the festival with my friends Thomas Swick and his wife Hania. Check his blog for more:(http://www.thomasswick.com/blogs/tswick.php)

Meanwhile, Doreen and I got a bio-fuels story published on August 23rd,
(http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/sfl-biofuel-update-082309,0,4243854.story).

On August 15, I went to Maryland to talk to the volunteers of the Association for India’s Development (AID), Baltimore chapter, on farm crisis in Vidarbha. It was heartening to see young friends taking interest in what’s going on with agriculture back home.

What else! Yes, I cooked Indian food at Paradise farms on Sunday, August 30, for 20 people – all my new farmer friends. The menu: Bhujiya, Kashmiri rice, Masala rice, Chapati, Jackfruit curry and much more. My friend Hani Khouri brought his home made goat-cheese, yogurt and a variety of his home-made tasty ice-cream.

I will later post pictures to lend credence to this story and the fact that I did incredibly well with cooking. No one complained, which means everything was alright.

And a young female food writer at the luncheon wanted from me some of those recipes. God, I pray, my mom’s not listening!

Here’s how the small farms story came alive:

Tapping into the trend -

I came to Florida early May with one intention: See farms, meet farmers and learn how they are doing when their counterparts are killing themselves in India.
The corporate food businesses have taken over agriculture in the United States in the last 30 years driving family farms out of business.

As P Sainath, my mentor and India’s frontline journalist wrote in one of his dispatches from the U.S. two years ago: There are more prisoners in America than farmers.

The first thing I did was to do an online research. I found the 2007 Agriculture census report, a wealth of information that needed to be deciphered. It hides more than what it reveals. Some glorified statistics are really a veil to cover the darkest chapter of the U.S. farming – collapse of sustainable family farm operations all over the country.

In South Florida, it hasn’t been any different. Most of the land is now controlled by two or three major sugar conglomerates. Housing developments and real estate consumed the family farms in the coastal belt, so as I began my assignment with Sun Sentinel, my biggest worry was: Will I get to meet and visit any family farms at all?

I took to what I think works the best: get on to the field.

As I began researching for some local farms, new nascent trends surfaced.
I found Nancy Roe, a 10-acre farmer in Boynton Beach, 15 miles north of Fort Lauderdale. That was in May end. One morning, I drove down to her farm and it opened up the whole new world.

It’s a farm that exists in the midst of plush housing complex. My interactions with a 60-plus Nancy, a Ph.D. in horticulture, showed me the direction.

At her farm, I met Henry Williams, a 78-year-old black farmer. Then I met some more members of their tribe, and more.

All of them shared great concern for small farms on the planet. Many of them had read about the tragedy besieging the Indian farmers and wanted to know more.

Who were they? They were all small, very small farmers, tilling small acres in the urban sphere. Many of them turned out first-generation farmers, growing food for their neighborhoods. They told me some of their neighbors want to eat fresh and local. But why did they take to farming? And are they into it as a hobby? No. Many of them are in the profession by choice and driven by a commitment to build local food systems.

This is South Florida, I said. And it isn’t a farming ground any more.

My new friends told me to look around and look through the housing developments. I found small farms – conventional and non-conventional – sprouting all around. From Vero Beach north of Fort Lauderdale to Homestead the belt of 150 miles or so has tens of new small farms, re-invigorating local food system with a strong consumer support. I pitched the story, and my mentor immediately said: go for it. We thought the best way to tell this trend is through vignettes, each symbolic of some regional or national trend.

Field trips and working with a photo-journalist:

Early on, we decided this has to be a multi-media project. Along with tons of pictures, we needed to record sound for sound-slides – where pictures are accompanied by the sound-bytes. It was a great education to work with one of Sun Sentinel’s gifted photo-journalists, Sarah Dussault. Sarah and I visited all the farms that I had zeroed in on for my story. But before our field visits, I had visited all the farms at least once. So I knew what we needed to shoot and ask each one of them. Post our mid-term seminar at Poynter in mid-July we did most of our field visits for pictures and interviews.

For Sound Slides project, you need to ask pointed questions for pointed answers, which is what I did as we drove to those farms several times. It was fun.

Putting it all together:

I first wrote it long, and then cut it deep.

It was time for visualizing how to put the story on the pages: The photo editor selected 25-30 pictures for each vignette. Graphic designer did the rest.

The best of them were then picked up in a detailed meeting where we discussed the story’s forward-looking appeal, uniqueness of each farmer, etc.

The graphic designer and photo-editor decided the story need a strong visual appeal –which is why the vertical film-like approach for the front page and horizontal approach for vignettes on Page3. To me, it was like learning the ABC of graphics.

Show me, don’t tell me:

When I finished with my edits, it was time for Tony (Mr Antonio Fins) and Sunday editor, Gail DeGeorge, to take a look at my job. They did and came up with strong suggestions and edits. My work had only just begun, and I thought it was over.

The last week, finally, it all worked out well. I had written the story for some 20 times.

The most invaluable lesson learned? Don’t tell in as many words; show it to readers.

(http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-jhcol-small-farms-outlook-08sbaug30,0,4458836.story)

FARMS, FARMERS AND FOOD...

Fort Lauderdale (update July 20-August 14):

"Something," said Bob Hochmuth of the University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agriculture Science, "is happening". It's so far under the radar.

Trends do not surface on their own. They have to be sensed and analyzed. Hochmuth had just nicely summed up to me the story.

Good that I attended on August 1 and 2 the first ever small farms and enterprises conference at Kissimmee, near Orlando, in Floria, and to everyone's surprise, the attendance at the two-day event that was marked by the food extravaganza underlined that the story I am working on, is bang on target. On time.

Small farms are indeed bouncing back across the United States: watch out for my next story, and you'd know what all I'd been doing this past three weeks.

For the records though - lest I shall lose some 33 bucks a day - I had been doing the field visits, as any good journalist must, for my story, South Florida's humid summer notwithstanding. I've been shooting videos, recording sound and writing.

I'm after all a living creature of the multi-media age.

But writing this story has been fun. I've re-written and edited it for at least five times. The editor takes a look at it, now.

It was, however, satisfying to attend the conference and to our surprise, we were the only journalists at the event.

My story on small farms fulfils three of my goals - study U.S. agriculture, tight and narrative writing and multi-media.

Last Sunday, I also wrote my first editorial column in the op-ed section of the Sun Sentinel. My friend from China may perhaps not like it, but it was on the Indo-China tensions building in the continent, even as the two countries held talks last week.

Editorial columns are not easy, I realized that. Speaking is one thing. Putting it down quite another. But my mentor, Antonio Fins, gave it a read and said: "actually you've hidden your lead in the last para." I agreed and turned it on its head.

The piece came out well and met my fourth goal - writing opinion pieces.

Doreen Hemlock, one of my mentors, and I have finished writing a story for business section, and two more are work in progress.

In between, I finally caught up with some sound sleep last weekend.

On the social front, this past couple of weeks, I connected with the Indians living here. And found, some of them are more Americanized than the Americans!

KNOW THY NEIGHBOR, STUPID!

Two events made headlines in the second fortnight of July: The 40th anniversary of America’s first manned moon mission, Apollo 11. Two days later, the world’s superpower was debating whether or not the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was a racial discrimination issue.

One channel even went on to conduct a public poll: Is race still a reality?

Even an astute president like Obama got carried away by the issue, when he castigated the local police for acting “stupidly”, a statement he resented the very next day by admitting that he should have been more careful about his choice of words. Good for the police officer; he got up, close and personal with the President over the last weekend on the widely publicized 'beer summit'. The media and people are still acidly split on the issue. The debate is far from over.

What amused me was not the police action or the racial overtones to the issue, but the fact that neither the caller nor the professor knew of each other as neighbors! The issue would be non-existent if they knew each other. It’s as simple.

To me, the problem is with the phone call itself. I imagine if it were India and if my neighbor would lose his key, he would knock on my door even in the middle of the night, have a cup of coffee chatting about the problem and then, both of us would wake up other neighbors in trying to break his lock so that he would get into his house. Once in, he would make coffee for all of us. We go to bed happy.

We would call the police and alert the neighbors only when we are sure the one breaking into the neighbor’s house is not the owner himself/herself.

In India, believe me, the police would arrest the caller for wasting their time if they discovered that his/her neighbor had had to break his lock to enter his own house because he/she had lost the key. If you don’t know your neighbors, the neighbors would take you as a terrorist and inform the police of your suspicious behavior. Believe me, the police would come and interrogate you to their satisfaction.

The trend of neighbors not being acquainted with each other in some big metropolitan cities in India is for the government and common people a matter of grave concern.

The police in my hometown of Nagpur run a program where they ask citizens to alert them if they found someone with suspicious behavior living in their neighborhood.

We are on the other extreme of ‘neighborhood dharma’!

I feel a tad sad to see that people don’t know or talk to each other in the neighborhood here, exceptions apart. For, if they knew each other, I bet, economic recession wouldn’t be this hard to take on.

When I first arrived in Fort Lauderdale, I felt like living in a no-man's land. I'd hardly see my neighbors. I didn't know if they existed, until on one day, I decided enough is enough and brandished my Indianness by knocking on their doors to say "Hi, I'm your next door neighbor; just so you knew I live here."

I wasn't doing any big favor to them, but to myself. I needed to know who lived around me. To my surprise, I found my neighbors surprisingly welcoming. They wanted to talk and connect as well. It took me exactly a week to discover that each of my neighbors had pets. Dogs never barked. Cats never crossed their line!

I am still unsure of what these pets do inside, when their owners leave for work!

It may sound cynical, but I see a distinct link between the two headlines. It shows the state of American society. The country unites in its flight to moon or mars or in its supposed fight against an unseen evil, but goes back to its individualism when it comes to personal and emotional relations up close.

I hope my nascent impression is wrong.