Sky High Farm
Initiated by artist Dan Colen, Sky High Farm has grown into a charity and fashion label, battling food insecurity and creating timeless pieces of workwear.
Since its founding in 2012 by New York artist Dan Colen, Sky High Farm has quickly expanded in a variety of ways. Working with Executive Director Josh Bardfield, the farm now operates as a public 501c3 nonprofit organization, directly donating 100% of its sustainably produced food to community partners in our collective effort to achieve long-term solutions to food insecurity. And just last year Daphne Seybold and Dan Colen co-founded a separate entity, Sky High Farm Universe, a for-profit brand whose revenue from quality goods including a seasonal clothing collection produced by Dover Street Market Paris and collaborations with the likes of Denim Tears, Samira Nasr, Comme des Garcons SHIRT, Alastair Mckimm, Balenciaga, Mel Ottenberg and Converse and a functional gut-health beverage called SHF Honey Pop launched exclusively at CA-based wellness grocer Erewhon, help to power the farm’s work. We sat down with the founding members of the farm and the brand built to support it.
PAIGE SILVERIA
Sky High Farm seems to have been expanding recently—from collaborations with Dover Street Market and Balenciaga with your clothing brand to the recent launch of a honey seltzer beverage with Erewhon and your grant programs.
DAN COLEN
I founded Sky High Farm in 2012 and it was originally run as a part of my art studio. In 2020 we initiated a 501c3 and have been operating as a public nonprofit organization since then. That structural transition has enabled us to expand our operations and programming capacities considerably. Following that transition, a group of the farm’s supporters have come together to found a new entity, Sky High Universe, which is structured with the singular purpose of sustaining the nonprofit’s work by creating unique revenue streams and expanding the farm’s audience and support network.
PS
Josh, can you speak to the individual short-term and long-term goals for the nonprofit—especially with the newly purchased 570 acres?
JOSH BARDFIELD
Our short- and long-term goals are interwoven. Over the next two or three years, we will continue to reinforce the pillars of our work: regenerative farming for donation, farmer training and education, grants to farmers and food justice advocates to build greater equity in the food system, and forward-facing educational programming for youth across the Hudson Valley and NYC.
Over the long-term, SHF is expanding its food sovereignty mission by building an inclusive operational and educational farm, food hub and residential community dedicated to ecologically-centered agricultural education and farm business incubation in the heart of the Hudson Valley. Our project simultaneously addresses responsible land use through regenerative agriculture; the fragility of our local food system and nutrition insecurity by growing food exclusively for donation; opportunities for the next generation of young farmers to find their place in agriculture through formal education; and deployment of food justice and arts-based education to narrow the gap between food production and food knowledge as a source of community-empowerment.
Over the next decade, we envision these activities coalescing around the proliferation of a new vision for local agriculture where people collectively define their food system and the policies that underpin it, with sovereignty at the center.
PS
We hear so much about food scarcity in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc. But rarely do we think of it as a Western problem. Can you explain what’s happening even in places as close to home as Upstate New York?
JB
Food insecurity is a product of a food system that is inherently unjust. It is a product of agricultural policies that favor profits and politics over people’s needs. It is a leading driver of pollution and climate change. It abuses land to produce crops, such as corn and soy that are not used to feed people, but to feed dairy cows or to be processed into ethanol or sweeteners. Moreover, BIPOC farmers are historically disenfranchised, deliberately excluded from access to land and resources. These variables have conspired to perpetuate a system that is racist, unjust and unsustainable. Food insecurity is a symptom of this larger problem and needs to be examined within this broader context to be truly understood.
“I don’t see how anyone can move through the world without a sense of urgency and anxiety around climate change, unless they’re willfully ignorant.”
PS
With the SHF Universe fashion brand, you've created a new conduit that gains you access to an even larger audience—a way to regularly generate press, dig into others’ psyches. How has the response been to the clothing?
DAPHNE SEYBOLD
So positive—what is inspiring is how much the industry has come out in support of our work, and have understood the power of the model since day one. There has been zero resistance to the Wholesale Donation Program (WDP) for example: a wholesale model in which every retailer that carries the collection must commit to an upfront donation, thereby rendering all customers donors to the farm’s work. In our first 12 months, we raised over 300K+ for Sky High Farm. To see this kind of unification across the industry is deeply inspiring, but also a testament to the power of proposing new models by which to affect change.
PS
How important is it that the creation of the collection is sustainable? Can you tell us about the fabrics you use and manufacturing partners you work with?
DS
Deeply. We look to re-imbue the preponderance of amazing design that exists in the world with value again. As it relates to partner production, DSMP sources dead stock, vintage, upcycled fabrics in the manufacturing of our collections. The world is totally habituated to newness and we believe high-quality products made of what might otherwise be deemed waste, can be made covetable again. Our core collection is made of vintage and deadstock and customized by hand in the Hudson Valley, NY. As we penetrate new markets we see that each industry is grappling with its own relationship to sustainability and inconsistent standards for what that actually means. Our beverage partner on Honey Pop - private-label manufacturer FedUp Foods - is deeply holistic in its approach. They see the current food system as extractive, and as a response strive to create functional beverages that prioritize regenerative growers and sustainable suppliers.
PS
Do you see a shift, not only in the fear of climate catastrophe, but also in just creating a more equitable society, building community?
PS
Dan, tell me about the video that encapsulates many of the issues the brand and the farm seek to address, that you will be screening at Manifesto.
DS
The animation is a manifestation of the themes we explored while designing the Spring 2024 collection, which Sky High Farm Workwear collaborated on with Mel Ottenberg. The collection takes a burning American flag as its central iconography. We utilized different stylistic presentations of a burning flag to explore the multiplicity of meanings conjured in that provocative image- from patriotism to protest, from political to personal, from cultural to environmental, from ceremony to degradation and from literal to poetic.
