Harvest

During the COVID pandemic, I picked up gardening. I was sitting at home playing Stardew Valley, growing virtual crops on a screen, when it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from doing it for real. My mom drove me to Home Depot, and for the next nine months I fell in love with watching the plants I cared so much about grow. Seeing the fruit come in, solving problems as they showed up, reading everything I could to learn more. In a time when nothing felt certain, tending to those plants made me feel connected to something greater than myself.

A few years later, in 2024, my family took a trip out to Prince Edward Island. Driving through, I was stunned by how beautiful it was. Farmland for miles in every direction, and it brought me right back to my gardening years, to how beautiful the Earth we take for granted every day truly is. Before that trip ended, I told myself I would find a reason to come back as soon as I could.

That reason turned out to be Jordan. I found him online and read his story, a life that went from drug use to organic regenerative farming, and I knew I had to capture his perspective on what it means to be a farmer in the modern age. The shoot went beautifully, and I left the island convinced I was making a film about one man’s personal journey. Then I sat down in the editing room, and a different story started to surface.

Watching the footage back, I realized this film wasn’t really about Jordan’s life. It was about the ground underneath it. Industrial agriculture is stripping the soil faster than the land can rebuild it, and one of the few real answers we have is supporting farms like Jordan’s, the ones that heal the soil as they harvest from it. What began as a portrait of one man became a story about a global crisis that most people never think about, even as they eat from it three times a day.