Farmers on the Screen

After the successful heritage project ‘Cinema Rural‘ CAG continues its path in cataloguing, describing and preserving the audiovisual heritage of rural and agriculture history. Funded by the Flemish Government, the project “Farmers on the screen” centers around the agricultural television program ‘Voor Boer en Tuinder’ (For Farmer and Horticulturalist). The program ran on the Belgian public broadcaster BRT from 1959 until 1989. More than 470 episodes were produced over time and aired on Sunday afternoon. The project started in 2022 and will be finished by the end of 2023.

For many, ‘Voor Boer en Tuinder’ is a television monument. Since 1959, the BRT program was a regular Sunday afternoon appointment and gave an insight into the ins and outs of Belgian agriculture and the countryside. The main purpose of the program was to inform farmers and horticulturists about new agricultural practices in the agricultural sector.

What began as a means of educating farmers and gardeners, however, quickly grew into an iconic program that also reached an extensive non-agricultural audience. As such, the program has a great historical legacy because it not only portrayed the modernization of agricultural and horticultural practices, but equally because it played an important role in the representation of the agricultural sphere in the public debate.

During the project CAG aims to provide all 470 episodes with qualitative descriptions, based on archival research and make these descriptions public accessible in the ERHFA-database. Furthermore, a selection of episodes will be digitized, followed by a thorough research on the involved copyrights. A selection of these digitized episodes will be made publicly available for educational and scientific purposes.

In order to engage with the public and to add to the quality of the descriptions, CAG will organize different working sessions together with different agricultural museums to engage with volunteers who have a background in agriculture. They will assess and discuss the episodes and their specialized findings will be added to the descriptions.

Behind the scenes, the project is a perfect opportunity to further enhance the digital infrastructure which holds and structures all the data on these agricultural moving images in Belgium. We engage with the aim of the Flemish government to make all collections interconnected and machine-readable. It serves as a pilot-project to implement the so-called ‘OSLO-standard’ (Open Standards for Linking Organizations) to digitally anchor the mutual relationship between the various collections and heritage types in Flanders in a sustainable way. In this way the project pursues an integral heritage approach, with an eye to greater interconnectivity of agricultural heritage, which ultimately also translates into better and greater digital availability for users.

In this way, CAG continues to work with its partners to highlight the fascinating and beautiful audiovisual heritage of agriculture and the countryside.