The Voices Project at Michigan State University Museum presents resources to build greater understanding about farmers, farming and food. These issues and relationships affect everyone, everyday. Our health and the environment are at stake. From the beginning, this project was imagined as a way to make the voices of farmers come alive and by doing this to stimulate discussion about the economic and ecological sustainability issues contemporary agriculture faces. . . . issues that affect children, families, farmers, our communities, and the land around us.

Arts and humanities approaches are at the core of the Voices Project. Arts and humanities provide avenues for individual expression and give presence to experience in ways that aid understanding. Using civic dialogue to engage farmers and the consumer public builds our capacity to learn and to transmit knowledge. Art and culture offer us new ways to look at the world around us. They open our minds to new ideas and introduce opportunities for relating to one another.

What Will Be in the Fields Tomorrow? is a readers-theatre activity for informal, group reading that can bring people together in a common experience. Fields is entertainment; Fields is education, and at its best, Fields provides a starting point for continuing the conversation through facilitated dialogue and programs on important issues.

Resources included here are: a readers’ theatre script for group reading and to inspire public exploration of these issues, lists to encourage book club and film festival programs around sustainable agriculture, an introduction to civic dialogue as a way to engage community around these issues, and essays to help introduce readers’ theatre to your community. Promotional and marketing materials are provided – photographs, graphics and credits -- along with examples from other communities.

Companion curriculum modules are in the works and will be available here September 2008. Information on Cynthia Vagnetti’s oral history work with American farmers and ranchers – the foundation of this project—is in the Research section. How we developed What Will Be in the Fields Tomorrow? is also reported there along with audience survey results from our six pilot audiences of sustainable and organic farmer networks and a community theatre audience that included farmers and agriculture educators. The Use and Case Studies section has reports from each of our pilot sites. Our plan is to add case studies of field use as they are shared with us.
 
These tools were developed for organizations to use in their own work: planning, training, building public awareness, and inspiring change around farmers, farming and local food.

Principal founders are Julie Avery, Barbara Carlisle and Cynthia Vagnetti.

Cynthia Vagnetti's Voices from the Field Collection is the foundation from which the script and curriculum were developed.

“Agriculture has not tended to its workers very well in the past. We try to take care of our employees on this ranch with housing, a retirement fund, coverage of medical expenses and that sort of thing. Any business should look to its’ workers probably first, even ahead of its’ shareholders, because if you look to your workers, then the business is going to be successful.”

Seasonal farm worker on the Williamson family farm, Okeechobee, Florida – Okeechobee County from People Sustaining the Land, 2002 by Cynthia Vagnetti.