Honest Agriculture is an ongoing photographic project documenting farming, family and rural life in North Wales. The project began as a university project after I moved away from Wales and started to feel homesick for the countryside and my family farm.
After spending several years in Cambridge, I began to look at farming with a greater sense of admiration, particularly as I came to appreciate the hard work my father had put into raising a family while running a farm and business all year round. I decided to photograph farming after one of my peers commented, “I haven’t seen farming like this before.” This surprised me and inspired me to focus my university project around the farm and my dad’s work.
What began as simple snapshots of odd moments during the working day developed into a more considered approach, experimenting with professional techniques and journalistic styles to document the realities of farming. Over the past five years, I have experienced more of the farm through a camera than I ever did growing up there. Looking back, I often wish I had carried a camera with me all those years ago to document what I experienced when I was younger.
The main focus of Honest Agriculture is to show the difficult, day-to-day work involved in farming, while also exploring the culture, scale and changing pressures surrounding agriculture in the United Kingdom. Through photographing my own family and the wider farming community, the project aims to give an honest representation of a way of life that is often removed from the everyday experience of those outside the industry.
The project has also developed alongside significant changes affecting agriculture, including Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Issues surrounding food prices, exports, government funding and the increasing costs of farming have become important parts of my research and understanding of the industry. I have also explored how farmers are adapting by diversifying their holdings and adopting conservation projects to benefit local wildlife, sometimes sacrificing agricultural production in the process.
Through Honest Agriculture, I hope to continue documenting the changing relationship between farming, family and the countryside. This is a project I intend to continue for the rest of my life, allowing it to develop alongside the farm, the people who work it and the changing landscape of agriculture.
