FARM COMPASS

Interactive portal for tracking the actual effect of EU agricultural funds – or how it takes jobs away from small farmers by pouring money into the hands controlling industrialized monocrops.

In 2016, when David was just starting to toy with the idea of going into data science (fast-forward to now with him in the middle of his Berkeley Master in Data Science degree) we took part in a small data hackathon in Sofia. While others largely had previous work and analyses to build on and present, we, the storytelling misfits, had to start from scratch. We decided to focus on tomatoes. Specifically how they and the family farms growing them have been methodically pushed out of the sun-kissed land they were traditionally farmed on, and replaced by wheat and rye crops where tens of hectares can be tended to by a couple of one-man combine harvesters. What started as a fun little website with the proud badge of honour of winning that small hackathon, caught the eye of Nicolas Kayser-Bril from Journalism++ who suggested we made something bigger about the EU-wide adverse effect agricultural subsidies that are supposedly helping out small farmers actually have.

The result is this interactive data story created by Journalism++ and Tanuki Films for the Open Knowledge Foundation, as part of a grant by the Adessium Foundation.