Native Public Media collaborated with series producer Wesley Horner and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS) to produce the features about the lives and work of farming families. The field production – location recording of farm families’ stories – followed a yearlong, full cycle of the seasons.

The Pecusa family is Hopi and Pima from the village of Bacavi on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. Their immediate family has been farming in their area for at least four generations. Before them, ancestral people farmed their land intermittently for nearly a thousand years. The Pecusa family farms in a largely traditional manner, using little farm machinery and employing ancient dry land farming practices that allow them to grow corn in an arid environment that receives only 8-12 inches of rain per year.