A local non-profit group asked me if I would photograph some farms in the country. They said they wanted them to be clean, spotless, pastoral, the kind you see in Vermont calendars. I declined. I love real farms, just as I love the lives of real animals in the real world. New York State is filled with real farms, and they are not pastoral. They are smelly, chaotic. Nothing speaks more to the state of the dairy farm than they astounding way in which cows are fed in the winter – with sileage grown in vast fields and stored in concrete bunkers, dug up and hauled around by giant, noisy tractors,  then covered with tarps and tires to try and keep the wind, raccoons, deer and rats away.

It seems pre-medieval to me, yet dairy farmers have yet to come up with a better, less cumbersome, ugly or chaotic way, even in the digital age. There are some things even the Internet cannot disrupt. Real farms are beautiful to me. They are works of art and imagination and endurance, each in their own way. I cannot expressed my awe and admiration for the people who live on them and keep them going.