Sky High
Farm to Table
(and T-Shirt)

As straightforward as it might look at first glance, this is not your average farm: 100% of the food raised here is being given away for free. The entire operation is run as a nonprofit that has donated an estimated 87,000 pounds of fresh vegetables and 50,000 pounds of protein to food pantries and other food access organizations around New York state over the last decade. It’s home to a fellowship program aimed at training the next generation of growers, a grant program intended to connect farmers from marginalized communities with financial resources, and has inspired an upcycling-heavy clothing brand called Sky High Farm Workwear created to raise funds for the farm’s various initiatives.

Perhaps most unusual of all, the seed for this started with artist Dan Colen, former provocateur of NYC’s downtown art scene, whose general fuck-you attitude has manifested in everything from paintings made of chewing gum to hyperrealistic nude sculptures of himself, and earned him recognition from the Whitney Museum to Gagosian.

“Over time it’s felt most natural for me to see all this within the scope of my creative process. I'm an artist. I'm not a farmer, I'm not a justice worker,” Colen says on an afternoon in late spring, his 6-foot-6 frame sprawled on a grassy knoll on the Sky High property where he lives and works. “I do all of this as an artist…we're all less familiar with an organization being an artwork, or a 501(c)3 being an artwork, or vegetables being an artwork. But art is just the stuff that artists make.”

Sky High was born directly from Colen’s experiences in the art world. In the late aughts, a number of things coincided to shift his trajectory away from the downtown art scene he’d become so associated with. One was that, after years of having very little—“it was always hard to make a living as a young artist,” he says—his work earned the kind of acclaim that meant he suddenly had “way more than enough, in a really short period of time,” and he was trying to figure out what to do with it all. Then there was the tragedy of losing his close friend and collaborator Dash Snow to a drug overdose in 2009, which Colen says shook him out of the “romance of drug addiction and this kind of lifestyle” that the two had been embedded in.

This combination of professional success and personal tragedy pushed Colen to get sober, and to look for distance from the city and his old way of life. He bought a plot of land in the Hudson Valley, and through conversations with friends, the idea that would become Sky High Farm—which was officially founded in 2011—began to take shape.

One of those conversations was with an old friend who introduced Colen to the concept of food deserts, explaining that there are whole communities that don’t have access to fresh, affordable food (though Colen says he now prefers the term “food apartheid,” because of the way it points to the role that systemic oppression plays in limiting food access). When Colen hired someone to farm the land full time, it was with the hope of giving away food to address some of these issues.

Another crucial conversation partner was Colen’s childhood friend Josh Bardfield, a public health professional who had been working on HIV care and treatment initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. “I initially called him and said, ‘Hey, maybe I'll come help you all out there.’ He laughed me off and explained that I had literally nothing to offer them, no skills that would do them any good, and I would just be in the way,” Colen recalls with a smile.

Despite Bardfield’s no-bullshit response to Colen’s initial query, he began helping Sky High Farm set up its food access program on a volunteer basis, using his spare time to facilitate connections with food banks and pantries throughout the state. He helped Sky High set up programs that would allow them to receive feedback from the communities who received their food, ensuring that the farm was growing produce that recipients were familiar with and actually liked eating.

“People who use food banks traditionally have access to packaged and processed food, but not a lot of very high-quality produce and protein,” explains Bardfield while giving a walking tour of the property. “The produce they get is often sub-optimal, and the protein is often at expiration.”

Sky High’s mission became about changing that paradigm: Rather than food banks receiving bottom-of-the-barrel produce, meat, and eggs, they could get high-quality food grown according to regenerative and organic principles that prioritized ecologically sound growing practices. (Bardfield notes that the farm has never pursued organic certification because the label is largely useful in helping growers market products to customers, which is not part of the organization’s model.) For eight years, Sky High Farm ran somewhat quietly in this way, with one or two people working full time to farm the land and the rest of the gaps being filled in by volunteers like Bardfield.

But in 2020, as the pandemic turned the world upside down, food insecurity suddenly became national news—and Sky High Farm found itself in the spotlight as other organizations began reaching out to learn from its model. In response, Sky High hired more full-time farmers to manage the land, including Phil Haynes, a Stone Barns alum who became the farm’s Agricultural Director, Ellie Youngblood as Vegetable Production Manager, and Rosa Donaldson as Livestock Manager. Bardfield came on as COO, and Lexie Smith, a baker and artist in her own right who is also Colen’s partner, went from volunteering her time to being named Sky High’s Communications and Program manager, and the team continues to grow.

“COVID allowed us to speak to a larger audience, because all of a sudden there was all this awareness around food insecurity,” she explains, a T-shirt with the Sky High logo stretching over her pregnant belly. “There’s been this dramatic shift in the last two years at the farm to expand the offerings from a hunger-relief model focused on food security to one that is now equally focused on food sovereignty.”

The difference between food access and food sovereignty, Smith explains, is the difference between giving away food to people who need it and trying to turn the reins over to those very people so that they have more agency in co-creating food systems that adequately meet their needs and desires.

To that end, Sky High recently transformed a longstanding internship program into a comprehensive farmer training fellowship program, which allows would-be farmers to learn hands-on skills that they can bring back to their own communities. It also hosts volunteer days with nearby high schools and members of the public, and collaborates with local organizations on workshops and events serve as opportunities for education, gathering, and celebration around food, farming, and community..

The grant program, aimed at leveraging its access to funding gained through Colen’s art-world connections and Bardfield’s grant-writing experience, is in service of farmers and food justice workers that might have a harder time accessing the capital needed to run a successful operation.

“Many farmers don't qualify for grants and access to grant funding is highly exclusionary,” says Bardfield. “We wanted to basically make these funds available”—so far the organization has given away $100,000 in grant funding—“with no strings attached.”

In the last couple years, Sky High has outgrown Colen’s original ambitions, and looks poised to continue. The inspired clothing brand was founded in spring 2022 , a line adorned with the farm’s illustrated strawberry and moon graphic, with sales supporting Sky High’s mission, and there’s talk of moving to a bigger property in coming years, with new programming, the potential to integrate solar power onto the landscape, and more. Colen seems grateful for Sky High’s evolution and the ways it mirrors his own.

“My aspiration for my own art had to do with it having some sort of subversive or transgressive quality. As a young adult, I understood that to be a negative energy, as in, ‘I see things I don't believe in and I situate myself in opposition to them,’” Colen says. “I couldn’t see that there were these things I could have supported towards the same goal. Coming to the realization that I could protect or comfort or create security—and that could be a much more radical act—was an epiphany.”

Though Smith is much more prone to talk about Sky High in a way that grounds it in the reality of a working farm than an abstract artistic ideal, she and the rest of the team seem to appreciate the ways that the farm’s atypical origin story have allowed it to flourish—whether that’s through the way it’s unique adjacency to the art world allows for an unlikely audience, or the way that Sky High’s cheerful graphics can attract design-minded folks who might not otherwise be drawn to agriculture.

“At the end of the day, we’re a farm that grows food,” she says. “But there's a sort of creativity and poeticism built into it because it came from the imagination of an artist.”

Whitney Bauck is an environment and climate reporter who writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times and more