Exhibitions can spark questions around equality issues in farming

Two new exhibitions give visitors an opportunity to consider the ways in which we connect with the food we eat, the land it comes from and the people who work upon it.

In Glasgow, the Cultivating Equality exhibition (below) by photographer Sophie Gerrard is on display in Street Level Photoworks, Gallery 103, Trongate 103, until June 30. Part of the Gaia Foundation’s

We Feed the UK series of exhibitions across the four nations, it is made up of a powerful range of images, from striking rural landscapes to community growing in an urban setting at Edinburgh’s Lauriston Farm. Gerrard told me: “There are different layers of meaning for different people.

“People are going there [to rural areas] for their mental health, they’re going there for community, they’re going there for culturally appropriate food that they can afford. They’re going there for biodiversity. It may be they are returning to the land in some way or for some people it might be the first time they’re doing it.”

Cultivating Equality has several layers to it, referencing the reality that Scottish land ownership patterns and prices are making it difficult for many to get a foothold in agriculture, even if they come from within the community where they would love to farm.

Sons inherit Scottish farms 85% of the time, yet more than half of family farm workers are women. The Scottish Government’s Women in Agriculture Taskforce concluded that women’s contribution to the industry can be “undervalued, downplayed or simply unseen”.

Gerrard said: “Generally speaking, from an agricultural point of view, the dominant voice is a white voice, a male voice and a slightly older voice. What this project is highlighting is that there are myriad voices who need to be heard and deserve to be heard.

“If that’s not happening then we get a skewed perspective, contemporary and historical, of what agriculture is, what farming is, what the use of the land is and largely what a Scottish identity is. I mean, why should that be the way it is?”

The exhibition features an assured and influential voice in Scottish agriculture, Nikki Yoxall of the Grampian Graziers (above), whose work on regenerative farming and whose support of women in the sector have made her a highly respected figure.

There is a photo of Yoxall in the exhibition which makes me stop. She is holding a duck’s egg in her firm farmer’s hand as she looks across her shoulder to a hill-curved skyline. There is both movement and stolidity – a striking archetype.

Ally Nelson of the Gaia Foundation is the project lead. She tells me the exhibition is aimed both at a town and a country audience: “We’d really like to inspire farmer-to-farmer, peer-to-peer conversations as well. So, one farmer down the road might hear about the work and then want to know more and want to hear say Nikki talking about her techniques and then that might inspire them to work more in harmony with nature.

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“We want an urban community, a rural community and then also the farmers themselves to learn from these techniques through this really positive campaign.”

Regenerative farming is the focus of the Farming Fit for the Future exhibition, which opened in the Cateran EcoMuseum in Alyth, Perth & Kinross, last week and runs until September. It uses a mixture of audio interviews with contemporary and archive photography to explore the changing face of agriculture and food production.

My involvement with Bioregioning Tayside gave me an opportunity to work on part of this project, interviewing the farmers – many of them women – who are putting regenerative agricultural principles into practice.

The EcoMuseum is a tiny space in the pretty town but its concept spreads beyond the walls. The landscape and communities around it are also part of the story.

Clare Cooper is one of the co-founders and a co-director of the Cateran Ecomuseum. She begins our conversation with a quote from a man called Andrew Simms: “Museums are physical manifestations of civilisations, collective memories, inventories of the traces left in us by the past. They are also vital stories of change in our behaviour, culture, economy and technology, and by showing us how much we have changed before.

“Museums remind us of our ability to change now and help us learn the lessons of the past to illuminate the paths ahead. They’re more important now than ever as we face a challenge unprecedented in scale and speed to prevent the loss of the climate and biosphere which gave civilisation a home.”

“When I read that, I felt called,” Cooper said. She pauses before continuing: “The idea for the exhibition came from that bigger context but also from the idea that humans have always designed new ways of behaving.

“This exhibition tells that story of response to environmental change. We live in this huge farming community in Strathmore and there are some incredible people doing some incredible things. I think everyone is beginning to recognise the food security issues and I think that’s another conversation that people coming to this exhibition will have.

“The farmers have a deep understanding of their land and what it can do, and they’ve also been very thoughtful about the changes they’re making. I think that gives it a lot of integrity and it also makes you want to connect to people like that because they are really trying to work out what the best thing to do is.”

Both exhibitions give us a chance to be a part of a food conversation which will affect us all, as the growing effect of the climate crisis is exacerbated by impact of Brexit.

Ruth Watson is the founder of the Keep Scotland the Brand campaign