ResourceShelf reported on a Library of Congress blog post on the photographs in the US Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collection, the most popular among which are now available in a Flickr group under the heading FSA/OWI Favorites. That led me to some wonderful colour photos from the 30s and 40s from the same source. One of them particularly caught my eye. Not because it’s particularly well framed or for its dramatic subject matter. It’s just a pretty standard shot of some harvested oats fields in southeastern Georgia taken in May 1939. But someone — a Mr Raymond Crippen, actually, who sounds as if he has first-hand experience of wartime Georgian oat fields — has taken the trouble to annotate different parts of the image:
The most common grains in shocks were wheat, oats, barley. Farmers hated working with the barley. The “beards” stuck to sweaty arms, found their way down shirts – and they caused great itching.
This strikes me as a great way of documenting and sharing indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices and biodiversity. Has it ever been tried in a more formal way?