work continues on the industrial ag mega-zine project.
i've finished most of the main topics i wanted to cover (yay!) and have started going back to the beginning to revise pages, tighten things up, and see if there are parts i missed.
i also don't reeeeally have an ending. i have a bunch of pieces that can go on a final page...stuff about how even tho the ~dream~ of ever-expanding scientific ag isn't quite there anymore, the ~reality~ of industrial ag is more advanced and globally-integrated than ever.
i also have stuff about how agriculture is central to current problems of climate change, biodiversity, land use, and dispossession of native people. i also have pieces about regenerative ag and sustainability. but that's all sitting in a folder and marinating in my brain. so meanwhile i'm going back to the beginning.
i already re-did some of the first pages that i worked on, because now i have a much better sense of how big text should be, how big photos should be so that they're not too tiny and not too overwhelming on the page, etc. i also have a better sense of the overall vibe of the project (which i didn't know at the beginning).
now i'm working on a page about ~future farms~. lots of fun imagery there, and also a lot of really wild predictions. for example, from the USDA agricultural yearbook of 1960, in an article about automation in the future, is the sentence: "A small radioactive device in the stomach of the cow will send signals regarding health and digestion." ☢️ 🐮 🍔
honestly there's so much material on "farming of the future" from the 1950s/60s that i could do a whole zine just on that subject.
there's also a whole zines-worth of material about radiation and agriculture. on the one hand, there was a big promise of using radiation to do things like sterilize foods or inspect foods, but also they were terrified of the possibility of nuclear war, so there were materials put out by USDA about how to prepare and save your farm after a nuclear attack - including plans for nuclear-proof buildings for farm animals! from that same article that predicted a radioactive device in a cow's stomach, is a prediction for "automatically recorded weather data that will include radioactivity, evapo-transpiration rate, heat and moisture changes in the atmosphere from pole to pole." now why would farmers need up-to-date radioactivity data unless there had been some kind of nuclear nightmare? 😖
#agriculture #agriculturalhistory #wip #art #zines #futurism #automation