Field study: A decommissioned farm west of Berlin.

Sojabohnen, Schweinefleisch und eine Vogelscheuche

In Canada, the idea of creating and working with seeds came about because I’d been thinking about crops and seeds that had been nurtured over millennia, but were now being patented by global conglomerates, In Germany, an adventure to the countryside expanded thoughts on sustainability, end times, performance and film.

Research: Germany, Arable Land, the Amazon Basin:
Every German uses approximately 229 square meters of soybean farmland for his or her own meat consumption.Meat production is directly related to habitat destruction (and loss of biodiversity) in Central and South America and results in the acceleration of climate change. The Amazon rainforest is one of the largest carbon sinks on earth and the evaporation of enormous quantities of water (evapo-transpiration) has a global cooling effect.
Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans with more than 22 million hectares of arable land. Many parts of the Brazilian Cerrado -- one of the most species rich savannas in the world --is now intensively farmed for soya, leading to the destruction of at least half of the Cerrado. Much of what is grown in the Cerrado is exported to Germany, where it ends up in the feeding troughs of animals raised for meat production. Pork is the most popular meat in Germany. Soy is also found in tofu, chocolate, printing dye, bio-fuel, cosmetic products and medicine.

Sojabohnen (Soybean)  — at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (museum for natural history)

Decommissioned animal stable. Two hours west of Berlin.
Photo ©  Nora Novak

A clownish and rather slatternly scarecrow. Rural Germany.
Photo © Nora Novak