I had a great chance to both deepen my understanding of contemporary farming and help schoolkids do the same when the FarmerTime Finland programme, run by the agricultural advice organisation ProAgria Österbotten, commissioned an interactive image from me for their Thinglink platform.

My brief was to illustrate an Ostrobothnian (a province on the west coast of Finland) rural landscape with crops and livestock, wheat and greenhouses… FarmerTime Finland is a project that links schoolkids to farmers in real time. They also have a bunch of fascinating videos straight from the farms – and now, the interactive Thinglink that contains videos, quizzes and information.

I’d been in touch with FarmerTime earlier to interview them about my other ongoing illustration project, where I want to get away from the almost ritualistically stereotyped images of “countryside” that we usually see in children’s books. So the commission to draw tractors, silage, solar panels and earmarked livestock was also great research.