Skip to content
Home/ Where Our Food Comes from: The Magic of Skagit Valley
Where Our Food Comes from: The Magic of Skagit Valley

Where Our Food Comes from: The Magic of Skagit Valley

No customer reviews yet ISBN 9781960521101

An intimate, informative, and emotionally moving journey about how and where our food comes from.

We all eat. By the time food gets to your plate it has been on a journey. Open this book to the start of that journey, where much of your food (and flowers) comes from.

Some of the best soil in the world lies north of Seattle in the fertile Skagit River Valley. More than 90 crops are grown by farmers who immigrated from Europe, Japan, and Mexico. Farming is labor intensive and repetitive throughout the seasons, and daily tasks are required to keep the crops thriving. Wanting to show the unique mechanics of farming and who is involved in tending and harvesting the foods we eat, Craig J. Barber has spent years visiting and photography land and life on small mostly organic farms. He interviewed farmers, many of them third and fourth generation, whose stories are featured in these pages. He spent time with the field workers; not taking photos right away but gaining their trust. As a result of his persistence, Barber captures the physical demands and artistry of farming--field workers tossing cabbages up to another crew member in the back of a truck, a crew walking bent over behind a planter-tractor to make sure the seedlings are set correctly, the care and tenderness of those caring for livestock, the beauty of a kale field in the snow, and the drama of harvesting leeks on a winter night under a spotlight.

Where Your Food Comes From is a book with many facets. Look at and savor the rich photographs. Read the farmers' stories. Study the facts and figures to expand your knowledge about farmland, food, and farmers. The "magical" Skagit River Valley is unique in producing so much of the nation's and world's food (and flowers), but it is also a microcosm of the universal and worthy occupation of raising food. In Craig Barber's unforgettable book, we see how hard work, careful planning, and a love of the land combine to feed the world.

About the author

Product details

Pub dateMay 15, 2026
ISBN-101960521101
ISBN-139781960521101
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-05-25 21:17
$28.02 $40.00 29% off
You save $11.98 · list price $40.00
Only 11 left in stock — order soon
Delivery by Monday, October 12, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Individual Photographers - General
See all
Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement
Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion that he made in the 1870s and '80s, Muybridge was the first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study. He devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world, and ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture in the mid-1890s. <p/> <em>Time Stands Still</em> is the catalogue that accompanies a major exhibition celebrating Muybridge's fascinating work. Though the instantaneous photography movement stands as a crucial event in the progression of photography to motion pictures, this exhibition represents the first major organized treatment of the subject. Opening in spring 2003 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University and touring through 2004, it combines an examination of the artist's career in motion photography with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. Guest curator Phillip Prodger is the primary author of the catalogue, but the book also includes a valuable essay covering cinema's earliest experiments by Tom Gunning, an acknowledged expert on early film from the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, <em>Animal Locomotion</em>, in 1887. <p/> The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and are supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Among those represented will be the work of Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, the Lumiere Frères, and others.
$31.99
George Hunter's Canada: Iconic Images from Canada's Most Prolific Photographer
<p> One of three new titles in the Firefly Books-National Film Board of Canada partnership. </p><p> <i>"My mission is to show Canadians, and the world, a little of our country. The more they see something of Canada's grandeur and diversity of its people, the more they will appreciate it. I will not rest a minute until my mission is accomplished."</i> -- George Hunter, photographer </p><p> Nobody took more photos of 20th-century Canada than George Hunter. His photos are in atlases, textbooks, encyclopedias and magazines. They're in galleries, museums and public archives, on old postage stamps and currency. </p><p> Despite a 70-year career that saw Hunter cross Canada more than 100 times on photographic expeditions, he never achieved widespread fame or critical acclaim. Mostly this is because Hunter was a photographer for hire to commercial entities and the government. His assignments were, ultimately, to document progress. </p><p> Hunter's catalogue represents a chronology of postwar Canada, beginning with horse-drawn hay wagons and ending with modern semi trailers on multi-lane highways. He captured portraits of Canadians at work, and also became a pilot to further his career. His aerial shots of billowing smokestacks, open-pit mines, newly minted expressways and vast log booms dominate his portfolio, which to modern eyes is equal parts majestic and nostalgic. His is a portrait of a young country maturing into an industrial force&#x3b; a landscape as shaped by the people. </p><p> For information on the National Film Board of Canada visit www.nfb.ca. </p>
$14.13