Compost & Glyphosate

printed edition, 2020

Photo by Ronald Smits

Compost & Glyphosate is a pastiche of a lifestyle magazine aiming at stirring reactions and deepening the debates around agriculture within the french public, by showing the diversity of visions on farming practices in an attractive way.

As the world faces an ecological crisis, agriculture must undergo a difficult but necessary transformation. In France, mainstream media oversimplify and even ridicule the division between ‘industrial’ and ‘sustainable’ agriculture. They portray large-scale industrial farmers as polluters and poisoners, and small organic and ‘mindful’ farmers as saviours of the planet. But the real environmental impact and the reflections of each farmer nourishing the country are in fact much more complex and nuanced.

 The publication aims at visually and literary deconstructing a much too simplistic vision of french agriculture. The bucolic aura of urban and organic farming meets the rural, intensive and technology-based agriculture. By blending the simplistic, caricatural views into a refreshing new form, the magazine counters the bias and invites readers to do the same.