Móðir Jörð
Vallanes, Iceland 
2010-2012

What began as a brief stay at Iceland’s premiere organic farm in September 2010, initiated a love story with the Icelandic people and landscape. 

Situated on a fertile peninsula called Vallanes, east of Lagarfljót Lake near Egilsstaðir in eastern Iceland, the Móðir Jörð (Mother Earth) farm has been a pioneer in organic farming in the country of fire and ice for the past 30 years. Despite Iceland’s unforgiving weather, the farm grows all vegetables, fresh herbs, and grains. 

The workforce is largely made of volunteers from all continents. Most of them come to the farm while being at crossroads in their lives. Eymundur, the farmer and a certified yoga teacher, hosted endless cohorts with patience and gratitude, teaching them how to sow, prune, harvest, sort, pack, and ship the farm’s organic bounty. Eymundur has planted 1,000,000 trees south of the farm, a patient gesture he initiated in the late 1980s. Living off the land was a form of spirituality.

Long hours were spent outside on fields and in the howling winds under the rapidly changing Icelandic weather, performing age-old work cultivating the land. That included crawling on and digging in ice-cold soil to fulfill late season orders risking frost bites.

During winter storms, the farm was completely isolated with just one narrow gravel road connecting us to the thoroughfare to Egilsstaðir 30 minutes away. Our days off were spent cooking, baking, reading, hunting, fishing, and mapping out new worlds.

This early series was a fully-committed leap into environmental storytelling, turning my lens to Iceland’s rugged land and the people who shape it.