"The Greenhorns" documentary film

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Images

The Greenhorns magic goat emblem! Feel the force of young farmers!

Beautiful drawing of drying herbs by Greenhorns artist Brooke Budner

A wild wreath for the blossoming of greenhorns

Advertisement for a Greenhorns exhibition of agrarian art in San Francisco

One of the Greenhorns many, many promotional stickers. 25 cents each, printed on 100% recycled paper on a hand press in NYC!

A promotional flyer from the Greenhorns "Pirate Seed Swap" at Slow Food Nation, August 2009

The Greenhorns organize many events for young farmers---even if sometimes they get postponed like this one!

A call to action to all America's valorous agrarians and wannabees.

Budget

Raised to date: $37,500.00
Estimate to complete: $181,960.00
Total Estimated Budget: $219,460.00
The budget numbers above are accurate as of 04/30/2009

Status

Post Production

Media Type

Video

Project End Use

Theatrical

Key Personnel

Severine von Tscharner Fleming
Director
Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 27, activist/farmer- has worked on farms for the past 8 summers, and is currently raising rare fruit, herbs, ducks + meat rabbits in the Hudson Valley of New York. Half Swiss, half Californian, Severine grew up in Cambridge, Massachussetts, halfway between avocados and gruyere cheese. She is currently the director of The Greenhorns (EASY LINK http://www.thegreenhorns.net), a small, volunteer based organization whose mission is to support, recruit and promote young farmers in America. Their focus is a documentary film called The Greenhorns, they also run a educational/celebrational events for young people involved in agriculture, a blog called "The irresistible fleet of Bicycles" (EASY LINK http://www.thegreenhorns.wordpress.com)and issue constant revisions of a 30-page guidebook for young farmers . Severine works independently as a consultant for Slow Food International designing a program for Advanced International Apprenticeships, and contributes to various publications on related topics. Severine’s work has been featured in the Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, NY Times, KPFA, NPR, The Montreal Gazette, Huffington Post and various blogs. She was a founding member of the Pomona College Organic Farm as an undergraduate student there and the founder of SAFE (Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology) at UC-Berkeley (including its zine, “Lettuce Turnip the Beets”). In addition to her role with The Greenhorns, Severine is a paid consultant to Slow Food USA and the Ninth Annual W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. In October 2009, The New York Times Magazine featured Severine as one of five of America's top "Food Fighters."

Sasie Sealy
Post-Producer
Sasie Sealy is an award-winning filmmaker living and working in New York City. She is a two-time winner of the Tribeca Film Festival, and her films have aired internationally on PBS, ARTE, and SBS and been screened at the Smithsonian and numerous festivals around the world. She is an alumna of the NYU graduate film program and is currently in development on her first feature SARAHN_12, winner of the Sloan Foundation Feature Film Grant. Given the state of her Brooklyn garden, Sasie doubts she will ever become a farmer, but she loves strawberries, okra, and (pasture-raised) bacon.

Laura Hanna
Editor
Laura Hanna is a filmmaker who, with Astra Taylor, produces short-form documentaries for The Nation. Their New York-based production company, Hidden Driver, specializes in feature-length and short-form films focusing on intellectual, cultural and political issues

A California native, she has worked in all stages of production, as an editor, producer, sound recordist, post-production sound editor, mixer and designer. She is currently directing the documentary feature Megapolis.

Outreach/Engagement Plan(s)

“The Greenhorns” is unique among several current films on the subject of food/sustainable agriculture because we support it through numerous outreach efforts. It is more than just a movie. It’s a movement. The mounting success of these several efforts, which we have spearheaded over the last year, is strong evidence of our capability to carry out an effective film project and concordant campaign. Serve Your Country Food, The Greenhorns Guide for New Farmers, and our event organizing, each described below, indicate our skill at conceptualizing media and team-based projects/programs, implementing, and developing them.

We believe there is great sense for selecting a film project as a key part of our organization's general strategy of engagement. The film gives community organizers an easy tool for calling what constitutes in effect a town meeting, a forum to launch strategic conversations about food and farm policy. Recent films on the state of American agriculture such as “King Corn” have proven the potential of documentaries to reach a national audience and to enliven discourse in this way.

We believe that the best way to evaluate the effectiveness that the film has on building awareness and cultural acceptance of young farmers, is to ask our audience for their impressions directly. We will do this by inviting viewers of the film to post their comments and share their own experiences on a user-interactive page on The Greenhorns official web site. It is our intention to reach many thousands of viewers at film festivals, school/community screenings, through DVD sales (Whole Foods has expressed interest in carrying the DVD) and through televised broadcast (with interest expressed by the Sundance Channel). All of the film’s viewers cannot be counted, but opening our web site to them is a proactive strategy for estimating their magnitude and diversity, gauging their response, and getting them personally involved in the young farmer movement. This strategy also encourages the use of built-in links between “The Greenhorns” film and our several initiatives online. To this end, The Greenhorns will apply our proven track record of building popular, attractive, and user-friendly web sites.

In addition, our reporting during the film’s distribution will include a list of screening venues/events, and “stories from the road.” It is highly likely that many of the screeners will want to have Severine and other young farmers in attendance, which will be documented on The Greenhorns blog.

The two Greenhorns projects described below have been created simultaneously with the film and are meant to increase its impact by engaging viewers:

ServeYourCountryFood.net (SYCF) is a web site hosting an interactive, hand-drawn map of the United States. The map offers powerful visual evidence of the young farmer movement while plotting its collective growth. Greenhorns are invited to locate their farms on the map and fill out a detailed survey about their local conditions, how they got started, their needs, and the challenges they face. The site makes their emerging culture legible to storytellers and interested media outlets, and quantifiable to food/agricultural policymakers. The site respects young farmers in both their diversity and aggregate force, functioning triply as a promotional image, public database, and social networking site. It also begins the organizing and statistical groundwork needed to form a National Young Farmers Coalition. SYCF is currently being expanded. The new site, to be launched in summer 2009, will have further mapping “layers” and networking features for young farmers to talk to each other and to share resources. In this last respect, SYCF will function much like a Craigslist for the national young farmer community.

The Greenhorns Guide for New Farmers, is being published by Rodale Press in 2009. While we finish the publication we have started distribution of the 40-page version, which is being used at Columbia University, UC Santa Cruz, The University of North Carolina and quite a few more. Co-authored by The Greenhorns’ director, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, and young farmers/writers Zoe Bradbury, Louella Hill and Paula Manalo, The Guide is a resource for the new generation of farmers full of inspiring essays, a comprehensive institutional index, and professional planning strategies. It bears quotations from the legion organic visionaries and is interspersed with original illustrations and archival agricultural images from the Prelinger Library. Currently it’s available as a free 40-page download on our web site. Whole Foods has expressed interest in carrying the published version of the book in their stores alongside a DVD of “The Greenhorns.” The book complements the film by putting thorough and concise information on getting started in farming into the hands of hungry young people.

Lastly, it is worth noting our on-the-ground work with young farmers. "The Greenhorns" film and our several parallel projects engender collaborations with farmers and allies in all regions of the country. These collaborations include garden builds with City Slicker Farms in Oakland, CA and Victory Gardens in San Francisco (March 2008); seedball fabrication tutorials with Farm Aid in Massachusetts (September 2008); and workshop leadership at the NOFA Connecticut Winter 2009 conference and Georgia Organics Conference (March 2009). The Greenhorns also organize gatherings for young farmers. In 2008 we collaborated and hosted five major events, including hosting a seed swap at Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, the first annual "Rabbit Roast" at the Glynwood Center in Cold Spring, NY (with 75 attending), and co-organizing a conference for young farmers at The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. We also led a seed ball demonstration at the Farm Aid concert. These events featuring workshops and networking opportunities for young farmers also share the important virtue of fostering the continuing and crescendoing development of agrarian culture. Distribution for the film will include gathering events such as these.

Funders

Name	Amount	Date
The Newman's Own Foundation	$15,000.00	04/27/2009
Individual Donors	$15,000.00	01/01/2009
Heritage Foods USA	$5,000.00	12/31/2008
Shei'rah Foundation	$2,500.00	12/01/2008

Location

P.O. Box 87
Red Hook, NY, 12571

See Google Maps

Short Synopsis

"The Greenhorns" is a documentary film that explores the sprit, practices and needs of America's emerging young farmer community--both urban and rural--who are the future of organic, sustainable food and agriculture.

Description/Treatment

Since November 2007, when activist and young farmer Severine von Tscharner Fleming founded The Greenhorns nonprofit organization, we have been traveling to and fro throughout the country searching out and documenting the best and brightest young American farmers.

Making agriculture sustainable in America requires not only a consumer shift and a political shift—both critical steps—but also the innovations, entrepreneurship, courage and hard physical work of many hundreds of thousands, even millions of new farmers. The intended outcome of “The Greenhorns” feature documentary film will be growing the future growers, workers and entrepreneurs of sustainable agriculture in America.

We have two specific goals with “The Greenhorns” film project. First, we aim to recruit more young farmers by showing the very purposeful and satisfying professional trajectories that are possible in sustainable agriculture. Our aim is to narrate and codify for viewers the professional bravery required to enter these fields, and thereby make it a more accessible and delectable choice for non-farm sector youth.

Second, we aim to promote the cultural acceptance and economic position of farming by advocating for the elevation in living standards of family farmers, young farmers, farm workers and the agricultural sector generally. “The Greenhorns” film will increase awareness of the efforts of the tough nuts who are doing this work already. We want to update the general public’s view of young farmers into that of being heroes of our time, so that the public may become invested in rooting for their success—and even of helping to facilitate that success at a local level by shopping locally, volunteering on farms, acting on local food policy, and in many ways becoming involved themselves with the food system. Recent bestsellers such as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma point to a swelling public consciousness about the need to engage with the food, the land, and the community of producers: our aim is to take that engagement a step further and encourage the general public and its prevailing institutions—schools, universities and government agencies—to proactively usher young farmers onto the land.

Young farmer Nic Koontz in Ft. Collins, Colorado is a good example of who “The Greenhorns” film project serves. Being a regular reader of our blog, Nic recently contacted us asking for our “comments, feelings, and words of wisdom” concerning a major barrier to the success of his Native Hill Farm: Capital. Nic wondered “what other young folks have done to get past that initial outlay, even for simple tools and structures,” to make a small farm economically viable. “The Greenhorns” film addresses these and similar questions directly by showing how young farmers have met these challenges with physical grit and resourcefulness.

The style and visual approach of "The Greenhorns" is intimate and conveys the feeling of adventure and discovery that has been at the heart of the project. The featured farmers, who are both reflective and playful, hardworking and childlike, give the film its engaging dual tone. Young professional cinematographers such as Taylor Gentry ("King Corn") and Singeli Agnew ("Pollen Nation") use the camera to search out the beauty of fields and faces, exploring farming practices upclose and delving into the nitty gritty of raw earth. The story is led, if not exactly narrated, by director Severine von Tscharner Fleming, who acts as a sort of Virgil figure guiding the viewer through America's diverse and mostly unknown farming landscapes. Interviews with young farmers--as well as with luminaries in food and sustainable farming such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser--mesh with contemporary scenes on farms, in kitchens, at markets, at important policymaking sites, all the way to the offices of The Department of Agriculture. The film foregrounds arguments for sustainability with evidence from American agricultural history as well by interweaving archival footage from previous eras of agricultural innovation culled from the Prelinger Archive. Starting with general overview material we follow with material that provides compelling narration that brings the contemporary potential of greenhorns to bear on the whole of America’s agricultural sector.

We have developed a regional shooting strategy that makes filming possible in segmented stages. This strategy minimizes our travel costs (our crews travel in a veggie-oil-fueled station wagon and stay with fellow farmers and supporters) and focuses our attention on close-knit, regional clusters of farms. Our remaining shooting schedule targets clusters in Missouri/Iowa, Idaho/Wyoming and Northern California. The Greenhorns’ coast-to-coast team can deploy different crews in different regions, capitalizing on local knowledge to plan efficient itineraries and to find new farms in local arenas.

Right now, in March 2009, we are finishing the last major shoots for the film and have begun post-production. Our film has been digitized and is being edited by Laura Hanna of Hidden Driver Films. We anticipate that the final cut will run approximately 100 minutes. Our aim is to have the film finished by November 2009. Our strategy for distribution will focus on public schools, colleges and universities, agricultural conferences and film festivals. We have already received at least 65 invitations/requests to screen “The Greenhorns” at schools including Harvard University, Middlebury College, and Yale University, and at consumer locations like Whole Foods in the Bowery in New York City; and about twenty invitations from film festivals, including the Mountainfilm Festival in Telluride, CO, and the Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC. In addition, we have been invited to present a rough cut of the film to a large public audience at The Brooklyn Museum in May of this year, and at the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment, The California College of Arts, Terra Madre, Stone Barns Young Farmers Conference, and Eco Farm Conference. Finally, we have been in discussions with Whole Foods to carry the DVD in their stores, and with the Sundance Channel about the prospect of televised broadcast.

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