Ted Genoways | This Blessed Earth

Meghan Hammond closing up the chicken coop on her family farm near Central City, Nebraska.

Kyle Galloway is taking over part of the Centennial Hill Farm operation with his wife, Meghan Hammond.

Rick Hammond co-owns the Centennial Hill Farm with his wife, Heidi. Their daughter Meghan is the sixth generation to farm there.

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One FAMILY. one FARM. one year.

A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm - Ted Genoways

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Text by Ted Genoways

Photographs by Mary Anne Andrei

For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

“A universal story of family farmers and all they’re up against.”—Willie Nelson