We cannot go on forever treating the soil as a chemical laboratory and expect to turn out natural food. What we are getting is more chemical food. Instead of eating live matter which can readily be absorbed by the body, we are consuming food which is rapidly becoming more artificial.

Introduction
My life as a farmer has always been interrupted by a photographer's wanderlust. In 1984 I left the farm to travel in the Himalaya Mountains in Nepal. But on the way there, during a stopover in Hong Kong, a friend encouraged me to take a short side trip into mainland China. This detour provided an experience that would alter the course of my life. I had been in China for only a few days when my curiosity forced me to ignore the restrictions that kept most foreign tourists out of the countryside. I walked for several hours away from the city of Chengdu, the capital of Szechwan province, eventually up a trail to the edge of a small settlement.

I stood balancing on a narrow pathway separating the fields. All around, as far as I could see, was a network of intensive raised beds, every inch meticulously planted with a diversity of vegetables, surrounded by an elaborate network of waterways and paths. Four thousand years of Chinese agriculture seemed to merge in this moment. I stood in awe of a system so sound that the same fields could be farmed over and over for forty centuries without any apparent depletion of soil or loss of fertility.

I found myself photographing like crazy. I had so often struggled reconcile my farmer's hand and photographer's eye. Now in China - two aspects inside me came together.

Over the next six years I traveled to many countries seeking out the remote, often-neglected traditional farmers. I wanted to understand how my own approach to food and farming—as a natural bond between community and a generous earth—had been lived out for thousands of years, how and why our society has destroyed that bond, and how we can redeem it.

I later returned to China to study the oldest agricultural tradition in the world. In Africa I visited ancient Kenyan farming cultures, and in the mountains of Burundi I saw a remarkable interconnection between farmer and farm. In the fields of Sicily, where rocks seem to outnumber crops, I stayed with farmers who still maintain the traditions that once fed much of Europe. In the Andes I witnessed a culture's incredible adaptation to a vertical terrain, and I was repeatedly drawn back to the land of the Hopi, to a people who have survived in a harsh desert ecology solely though their deeper understanding and connection to the earth and its spiritual forces.

Exploring food sources also took me to the landscapes of modern industrial farms where earth-crunching machinery and deadly chemical sprays at times suggested scenes from a war-ravaged nightmare. This was the provocative contrast.

But my wanderings did not stop there. This alone would have only offered a vision of what we have lost.

I wanted to discover some examples of hope. I began recording those who have quietly been working to restore the earth garden—to bring back purity, nourishment, taste, and beauty to our food. Here on these farms and gardens of the future a growing number of visionaries have combined ancient wisdom new and often unorthodox science, and a lively sense of aesthetics to create living farms that produce living food. From the fields and orchards of organic farms, to urban ghettos where food gardens have been built on abandoned lots, to communities where developmentally disabled people are nurtured through working with the land, smal1 steps are being taken— small, but powerful, steps.