Field Notes
Ginger Wolfe-Suarez
Field Notes - September 2, 2025
This piece contains a few selections from my field notes, observations, and other documentation from my research on larger nonfiction features.
These are all part of my writing practice surrounding small-scale agriculture in Florida. This has included interviewing farmers and farm workers, as well as documenting rare and subtropical fruit growing patterns. I’ve decided to publish them in this form to bear witness to topics ranging from habitat destruction to cultural farming practices, to strategies of survivalism. My hope is that these in-process articles and field-notes posted on this Substack offer a glimpse into my writing process on developing nonfiction feature stories across the state.
There is also some documentation from wildflowers I’ve come across on roadways traveling to farms (mostly in threatened and fragile ecological regions like wetlands or scrub). Also, I’ve included a few fragments or outtakes from my own property in Zone 10A (barrier Island in Florida) to record the site conditions, and farming process.
In the end, over the next few years I hope to provide or contribute to an alternative mapping of Florida. People outside of Florida often define the agriculture landscape in terms of orange groves and citrus trees which is a common trope. The truth is citrus production is at its lowest level plagued by disease and aggressive pesticide use. I want to show a crucial aspect of Florida outside stereotypes of theme parks, Trump, and citrus.
I am humbly trying to provide an alternative mapping of the state through writing about and documenting agriculture (primarily through tropical and subtropical fruit including Mango production), micro-agricultural businesses, interviews with farmers, agricultural workers, homesteaders, back-yard gardeners, and community gardens. I believe agricultural practices, culinary communities, and art offer an authentic place of connection and possibility. I believe this aspect and community tends to go under-documented and this representation of Florida is an important story to tell.
