As the first child of the first generation in my family to leave farming, the stories of my relatives’ struggles and successes running small dairy farms in Connecticut form a kind of personal folklore. When I visit, we still take my mother and aunt on drives to see how the old small farms are holding up—or not. So when I relocated to Davis and the Central Valley six years ago, the sheer scale of agriculture was striking. The ingenuity, infrastructure, and effort on display here contrast sharply with how the Valley’s natural landscape has been transformed. For the past five years I’ve used black-and-white photography as a way of understanding this complicated place. These photographs reflect on the region’s agriculture, which both sustains communities and redefines the landscape. Its reach is at once nourishing and disruptive, leaving patterns that are practical, visible, and persistent. My work seeks to hold these tensions—to witness not only what agriculture provides but also the marks it leaves behind.
