In his mug shot, the photographer George Steinmetz doesn’t seem especially threatening. It captures some of the inquisitive humanity that Steinmetz, a tall and direct people’s person with a John Malkovich mien, conveys in life.
On a recent drive through rural Pennsylvania, he told me how he had gotten himself jailed. It was 2013, and he was photographing wheat fields in Kansas from his motorized paraglider. Although airspace in America is not privately owned, after an hour of shooting he landed to a furious farm manager and a sheriff opening handcuffs.
“Photographers ask themselves a question,” Steinmetz said with a chuckle from behind the wheel of his Tesla. “Do we ask for permission or forgiveness?” The sunrise had been too good, and too brief, for him to find consent.
Indirectly, Kansas brought him here, to Lancaster County, on this hot September afternoon. Though the charges were dropped, his assignment that year for National Geographic — to document the increasingly global nature of the world’s food supply as the overall population nears 10 billion — has become a decade-long obsession, requiring contacts on six continents, repeat visits, much rejection and permission.
His new book, “Feed the Planet,” with text by Joel K. Bourne Jr., features the voluminous results: some 300 photos, most of them aerial, depicting a staggering variety of food production across 40 countries. Thai crocodile farms, high-tech aeroponic labs (where roots hang suspended), armies of Indian shrimp shellers, crop circles in Kansas. (And the consequent mug shot.)
“I try to make the most visually complete portrait of where our food comes from, and I find aerial photography to be the most visually interesting way to capture it,” Steinmetz said. “It communicates the task of feeding all these people.” Having spent 1997 to 2012 shooting hyper-arid deserts for National Geographic, Steinmetz, now 67, has swapped the glider for a photographic drone.
Of his many food destinations, this corner of Pennsylvania, which is among the most productive non-irrigated farmland in the United States, has stayed with him. He returned in September to see if he could get a better shot. The prize — and the challenge — are the stewards: the Lutheran separatists known as the Amish, whose commitment to antique technologies, agrarian ethics and deep insularity illustrate some rich paradoxes of our ever-expanding yet persistently local agricultural needs. Jams and preserves go to local tourist shops, pumpkins to Connecticut, and milk and cattle to buyers around the country.
On the dashboard navigation screen of the car, patches of farmland slide past. Steinmetz tapped on a promising one, then plotted a course toward it, a process that he calls, quoting geophysicists, “ground-truthing.”
Not long after, he spotted a horse-drawn mower down in a valley. He steered to the farmhouse and marched up the ridge of alfalfa, grown for the farm’s cattle feed. To a sweaty and wearily hospitable young farmer, Steinmetz introduced himself and his project. The man, Mark, considered the pitch for a while then decided, “It would be nice if you didn’t get our faces.”
Steinmetz unsheathed a four-winged mechanical bat and sent it skyward with a video-game-style controller. But only one mohawk of alfalfa was left. With his eyes glued to the controller’s screen, Steinmetz rapidly snapped the farmer shaving the crop, who turned out to be a 16-year-old boy named Aaron. Steinmetz inched his drone up and back for a downward diagonal view on Aaron and his animal, until Mark returned: “I think that’ll be enough for today.”
Elsewhere luck ran thin. In a corn field near the town of Vintage, we met Jonas, a shyly polite man with a red beard, who said, “We don’t like any publicity.” Outside the community of Kinzers, Stevie held a toddler in his barn and said flatly, “I’d rather decline.” Near a pumpkin patch, two little girls: “Well, you can’t.”
In the late afternoon, Steinmetz spotted a familiar farmhouse and pulled up to it. Out came Anna, 37, in a kopp hat and apron. Three years ago, Steinmetz photographed her silage corn and received a rare lunch invitation.
Her eyes lit up. “Very interesting to see you again,” she said. “The last time I saw you, you were doing our dishes.”
There was no activity to shoot, so a daughter, an angelic girl named Miriam, brought cups of warm milk from the cow house, as her mother and Steinmetz talked about the shifts in this way of life. “Dad farmed 50 years ago,” Anna said. “They didn’t really have a problem making a living with dairy cows.”
But even with 40 cows and a corporate buyer, the upscale brand Organic Valley, Anna observed that today “little farmers are an endangered species,” a hint of pride in her voice. “The big guys with their big equipment can do it so much faster and cheaper.”
Encroachment is not lost on Steinmetz. In the book, a grid of endless shrimp ponds in Indonesia stretches where mangrove forests recently stood. On another page an elderly farmer in the Fujian Province of China struggles under a shoulder yoke of watering cans. He is dwarfed by high-rises: a reminder of the pressures on China to protect food self-sufficiency amid rampant development.
The light was dying. As Steinmetz thanked Anna, she sized me up. “I would have imagined someone from The New York Times would come here with a suit and a tie,” she said. “You’d fit better on a farm.”
Prowling a new road, Steinmetz said with a sigh, “We might have to cut our losses.” Through the corn, sunset strobed into the car. Then, down the hillside across a field, he saw it: four horses and their driver mowing a harvested field flat. A giant dust plume shrouded them in amber. Four more minutes of light, if that.
Braking hard, Steinmetz popped the trunk, clipped together a bigger, stronger drone, and set it on the asphalt. The craft beeped awake, arched its hawklike shoulders, and whined off into the valley. As Steinmetz snapped photos, the horseman looked up from his mower, spotted the drone and rerouted to the barn. Out came a larger farmer. The man bellowed at the hovering camera, shaking a stick. Steinmetz squinted at the controller screen. A broom? No, a shotgun.
Steinmetz zipped the device back to the roadside, and dismantled it. By the time he had shut the trunk, the farmer was pounding toward us on a push-scooter — unarmed. Steinmetz blinked. “I’m not running from this guy,” he said.
“I don’t appreciate you infringing on our privacy,” the farmer said, panting, as he met us by the Tesla. Steinmetz explained himself: his interest in agricultural diversity, the pressures of dwindling sunlight for photographers. He opened a copy of the book.
The farmer, a bespectacled man named Mark, melted. Then the two men laughed. Sometimes animal activists come snooping around, Mark said: “We do things differently, and some people don’t understand.” The Amish are pacifists, he hastened to add. He keeps the gun for birds.
Mark is 36. He raises 40 cows for milk and 40 beef cows, which he will sell to slaughterhouses in Pennsylvania and Denver. Eighty acres of corn silage keep the herd fed through winter. As he flipped through “Feed the Planet,” he found a giant V formation of combines collecting soybeans in Brazil. “That is inefficient,” Mark pointed out. “They’ll have to all turn back at once.” He paused. “We’re harvesting in the morning. You’d be very welcome to come watch how we work.”
Over crab cakes at a diner in Kinzers, Steinmetz reviewed the day’s shots. He waffled. Dusty and a little lonely, they don’t capture the Amish communion, he said. “I need to get the human context while also showing the scale of it. Tomorrow could be great.”
Drones are an improvement from his paraglider days, when his engine might cut out midair, forcing a landing. (Though he stayed accident-free.) They gave “Feed the Planet” many beautiful, and conveniently achieved, landscapes: velvet hillsides of almonds in California, paint palettes of multicolored salt ponds in Senegal. “It’s fantasy time for photography,” Steinmetz said.
But drones’ espionage and warfare connotations take their toll on the process. “Talking about food transparency,” he said, “I have to be transparent with the people I’m shooting.”
Especially when seeking the “partial aerial,” as he lovingly calls it, just above the human head. This difficult angle allows him to ask more pointed questions about consumption and labor. For instance, in the book’s most powerful query on meat, a seemingly infinite river of goats — night-lit and blurred — files into a converted car carrier in Somaliland in Africa, bound for the annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage, where millions of animals are sacrificed.
“I don’t intend to tell anyone what to do,” Steinmetz said, swiping ketchup with a fry, “but the takeaway for me has been to eat less meat and dairy,” two very resource-intensive products.
At sunrise, we returned to the second Mark’s property, where we were welcomed warmly. Soon, neighbors arrived in horse-drawn teams, their steel wheels screeching on the gravel. There was a motorized combine for mulching the corn, a wagon to catch it and another wagon to relieve that one. Before long they disappeared into the field.
From our perch in the driveway, the arm of the combine bobbed faintly like an antenna. But on the controller’s screen it was vivid, spewing a column of green into the air. Around it, the farmers maneuvered their forecarts like Roman charioteers.
The two corn paths soon widened into a crossroads. Steinmetz hissed, “Yes!” He snapped like crazy when the teams converged, spun around and traded off. “Walter Iooss Jr. would line up the shot first, then wait for the play,” Steinmetz said, referring to the renowned sports photographer.
By 11 o’clock, the sun was in full roast, the batteries dead. Mark’s son Matt, 13, the one we spooked the night before, came up from his horses. Steinmetz showed him the shots. Recognizing himself on the screen, Matt smiled widely, flecks of green dotting his sweaty face. He and Steinmetz talked baseball (Matt backing the Phillies, Steinmetz the Yankees), until Mark called the boy back to the silo to help guide the corn mulch up the conveyor belt.
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