Móðir Jörð
Vallanes, Iceland
2010-2012
What began as a brief stay at Iceland’s premiere organic farm in September 2010, initiated a long-term love story with the people and landscape of Iceland.
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 20 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, and package the farm’s organic bounty. Eymundur also planted 1,000,000 trees south of the farm, a gesture he initiated in the late 1980s. Living off the land was a form of spirituality.
Long hours were spent outside in the howling wind and rapidly changing weather, performing age-old work cultivating the land. That included , crawling on and digging in ice-cold soil to fulfill late season orders. During winter storms, the farm was completely isolated. Our days off were spent cooking, baking, hiking, reading, hunting, fishing, and mapping out new worlds.
This early series was a fully-committed leap into crafting environmental stories, turning my lens to Iceland’s rugged land and the people who shape it.
