Justine Hanrahan, a 16-year-old sophomore at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, found it easy to pick a topic for a school project that requires students to make art that focuses on a cause.
“I’ve always been interested in growing food,” Justine said. “I’ve seen in Vancouver a growing amount of interest in local food. I wanted to give that movement a little nudge.”
So she decided to focus on sustainable agriculture. She made a 20-minute film, “Patch: A Time to Build Up Farms.” It’s accompanied by a patched scarecrow, which serves as a metaphor for local advocacy groups and farms.
She invites the community to a screening of her film at 7 p.m. Saturday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, 426 E. Fourth Plain Blvd. The trailer is also on YouTube, and can be viewed at http://bit.ly/egia8I.
Justine said she wanted to take her message beyond her school.
“I wanted to show it so people of different ages and from different places in Clark County would be able to see what farms are around,” she said.
Local women, dogs featured in The Wall Street Journal
Sue Foster’s border collie, Taff, may have flunked out of doggie agility school, but he did land the two of them on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
A Dec. 27 article about people renting sheep to keep their herding dogs busy led with Foster and Taff. There was a picture of Foster, a 56-year-old Battle Ground resident, inside.
“That was kind of neat,” Foster said.
A reporter from The Wall Street Journal found out about Foster and her friend, Karen Combs of Brush Prairie, through a farm in Olympia where people can pay to give their dogs practice herding sheep.
The reporter spent a day with Foster and Combs, 64, on the Brush Prairie pasture they lease for their 48 sheep.
They didn’t know they would be featured so prominently in the story.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Combs said.
Combs and Foster met outside the Vancouver Plaza PetSmart about six years ago, and Combs later told Foster about Brigand’s HideOut of Battle Ground, where dogs can train to herd sheep.
Taff had struggled with agility class because his natural herding instinct was so strong that he kept trying to corral the other dogs, so Foster decided to give Brigand’s HideOut a try.
Later, she rented sheep, and eventually bought some of her own.
“I just got hooked,” Foster said. “To see a border collie work, it’s just incredible.”
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