Young Farmers at Hay Festival Friday 28 May

If you enjoyed or missed the sell-out documentary-in-progress Young Farmers at Borderlines 2010  there's the opportunity to catch an update at the forthcoming Hay Festival.

Hereford-based Cantilupe Projects is filming members of the Herefordshire Federation of Young Farmers Clubs over a year: breeding the perfect dairy cow, laying a good hedge, parting sheep after a season on the Black Mountain, trying to find affordable housing - the passionate, authentic voices of farming’s ‘new blood’ talk about their work and the issues that affect their rural communities.

The event is at 9pm on Friday 28 May in The Ritzy tent on the Hay Festival site and will involve a short introduction from the director, Anne Cottringer, screening of extracts from the film, presentations from some more of the young farmers who have participated in the project and the opportunity to discuss the issues that the documentary raises. Footage is still being shot and the event gives a sneak preview of a truly local film-in-the-making. Book here.

If you can't make it, the documentary now has its own website (initiated in the Talk About Local workshop that was part of the Citizen Journalism event at Borderlines this year), featuring a different video clip from the film each week. There are also short extracts of the three young speakers, Richard Thomas, Ben Pritchard and Jono Rogers, at the event.

Citizen Journalism and the General Election

With the announcement today of the date for the General Election (May 6th in case you impossibly missed it) there's an excellent and informative post on Blogging the 2010 election by Talk About Local who ran the citizen journalism workshop at the Festival. It gives details of online resources that give this election, above all others, that extra interactive twist, enabling you to interrogate your local politicians directly on pressing issues, dig into their background, share their thoughts, offer yours,  not to mention exploring the betting odds. Whether more digital equates with with more democratic remains to be seen.

In addition, official Election Artist, photographer Simon Roberts, commissioned to document campaign activity in the run-up to the General Election, has made The Election Project a collaborative enterprise by inviting members of the public to contribute photographs of political activity in their area. With some affinity to the Mass Observation project of the late 1930s that, using volunteers, set out to document by various means the day-to-day life of ordinary people in Britain, it claims to be the first UK citizen journalism political photography project ever.

View the online gallery here

Upload your photographs here