GROW! A Film of Bright, Sustainable Hope

Getting Down to the Land

The sto­ries that unfold in the doc­u­men­tary are def­i­nitely ones of love. Husband-and-wife team Jenny and Jack returned to Jenny’s fam­ily farm where she had grown up so that they could pre­serve the land and farm it in the right way. Similarly, Wes brought his wife Charlotte back to the farm where he grew up because he felt the tug of the sea­sons; when spring came around, he knew he should be plant­ing, and both of them wanted to do it in a sus­tain­able way. Others had gone to col­lege for a vari­ety of careers—medicine, account­ing, chem­istry and physics—but by dif­fer­ent means had dis­cov­ered their paths to the land and, in doing so, knew they’d found their callings.

In today’s world with its myr­iad eco­nomic prob­lems, buy­ing land, for many, is not an option. Hence a num­ber of the farm­ers seen in GROW! have come up with other meth­ods to be able to farm. The most com­mon is tak­ing over as farm man­agers, where the own­ers want to make sure the land con­tin­ues to be used as God intended it. As observed by one of the landown­ers in the film, it’s a win-win sit­u­a­tion for both owner and farmer.

Others are still train­ing in one of the many appren­tice or intern pro­grams avail­able so that when they find their land, they’ll have the skills avail­able to uti­lize it to the fullest.

All the while, the viewer is treated to a feast for the eyes: the rolling, lush green coun­try­side of Georgia in which all of these peo­ple work. It’s not so hard to under­stand their deep and direct con­nec­tion with grow­ing and with the plants and ani­mals; and with­out excep­tion, it is that con­nec­tion which is keep­ing them going.

Possibilities

A key objec­tive for Christine and Owen in mak­ing the movie was to show oth­ers the pos­si­bil­i­ties. “There were a cou­ple things we wanted to accom­plish,” Christine explained. “One was to encour­age more young peo­ple to farm, to really look at it as some­thing that they could do, espe­cially with this econ­omy. A lot of these kids are get­ting out of col­lege and real­ize they can’t get a job in their cho­sen field. Maybe they should con­sider this.

“The other thing we wanted to accom­plish was just to open people’s eyes as to what was going on. We’ve screened all over the United States, and it’s kind of surprising—the aver­age per­son is like, ‘Oh, I had no idea peo­ple were doing that!’ Farming sus­tain­ably on a small scale is not some­thing that the gen­eral pub­lic knows about. You say ‘farmer’ to them and they pic­ture you on 500 acres with a com­bine, and you’re grow­ing corn or wheat or soy—period.”

And it appears to be work­ing. “A cou­ple week­ends ago we were at a farm­ers’ mar­ket,” Christine recalled. “This one guy came up to us and said, ‘You know, I gotta tell you. I’ve been want­ing to farm and been think­ing about it, and just been doing land­scape work. I saw your film and I went, “That’s it! I’m gonna farm!”’ So now he’s appren­tic­ing on one of the farms that we showed in the film.”

Behind the Scenes

The path to their becom­ing film­mak­ers orig­i­nally began with Christine and Owen hav­ing a desire to broaden the local and organic food move­ment in their area. “We started out as still pho­tog­ra­phers and at some point we knew that we wanted to make our pic­tures move,” Christine said. “That point arrived after we had moved to Georgia from Los Angeles.

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“We thought we had moved to a major agri­cul­tural state, which we had. But there’s a lot of con­ven­tional agri­cul­ture going on here, and back then when we started look­ing around for farm­ers’ mar­kets and food to buy that we wanted to eat, there wasn’t a lot of fresh, local and organic going on. So we started work­ing with an orga­ni­za­tion called Georgia Organics, pro bono. We said, ‘Please take our pic­tures and use them, because you’ve got to start putting a face on farm­ing. We will go out and we will pho­to­graph your farm­ers, and you can use these for any­thing you want.’” After a few years, as the food move­ment took hold and expanded, they then decided to tell the sto­ries of some of the farm­ers they had encoun­tered as they took pho­tographs and found their own food sources.

In GROW! sev­eral farm­ers talk about the hard­ships that can go along with the job—floods, drought, and the many other issues that can make farm­ing dif­fi­cult. One for one, each of these farm­ers says that despite the grum­blings and emo­tional tur­moil that can accom­pany the hard times, at the end of the day the results of their labors more than make up for it all.

Christine and Owen found in this kind of ded­i­ca­tion a com­mon­al­ity between them and the farm­ers. “You really have to love and feel pas­sion­ate about what you’re doing,” said Christine. “Otherwise you might as well not do it. We would always joke around with the farm­ers, com­mis­er­at­ing out there, and they’d be com­plain­ing about one thing and we’d be com­plain­ing about another. Farming and film­mak­ing are so alike—because you cre­ate some­thing; you put a lot of hard work and time and energy and your soul into it. When things aren’t going well, it can be sort of crush­ing. So that was pri­mar­ily the thing—you really have to love it.”

Their ded­i­ca­tion is tak­ing them for­ward into their next project—which, not sur­pris­ingly, will also be filmed on the farms they love. We’ll be watch­ing with great interest.

For more infor­ma­tion, includ­ing how to find or host a screen­ing, please visit www.growmovie.net.