AgArts: Imagining a Healthy Food System

Mary Swander

A Day in the Life
A bluegrass band is playing on the sidewalk outside our storefront office in downtown Kalona, Iowa. An Old Order Amish grandma peers into the AgArts window, her bonnet pressing against the glass. She reads our poster about AgArts farm residencies and an announcement about our latest podcast. 

Inside, I’ve just finished teaching an online class on the memoir and am about to hop on a Zoom call with an oral historian/audio artist who will be arriving in the fall from North Carolina, to document a Guatemalan community garden in Northeast Iowa. The audio artist will be in residence on a nearby AgArts farm, one mile from the Mississippi River. He will be working with a local multimedia artist who has been documenting immigrant communities in the state.

Soon, I slip into my recording booth to interview a writer, Fulbright scholar, and permaculture expert on the rejuvenation of her farm south of Calcutta, India. She details the landscape design and soil regeneration that makes her farm more productive financially and ecologically. She tells me of her amazement seeing fish, lizards, and a variety of birds return to her landscape. 

My days are full of exciting possibilities as the executive director of AgArts, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of two strange bedfellows: arts and agriculture. We are based in Amishland, where sustainability is modeled, but we reach out to artists and farmers throughout the world to join together and work for a more regenerative agricultural future. 

Mission
AgArts imagines and promotes healthy food systems through the arts. As a young nonprofit, we’ve worked with artists throughout the United States and abroad to reframe and open a discussion of what agriculture can do to enhance a healthy population on a more sustainable planet. Through our work, we open channels of communication that draw audiences into new ideas and perspectives about the food they eat, how it is produced, and how it affects our culture and wellbeing.

Organizational Structure
AgArts maintains a board of directors and an advisory board. We operate with an executive director, a podcast producer, a webmaster, a manager, interns, and volunteers. 

Background
Ten years ago, I wrote a play called Farmscape with one of my classes at Iowa State University, where I was a professor of creative writing. I thought the drama was going to be a class exercise in verbatim theater. We would have one performance, and then the script would go in the drawer. But a call from Fred Kirschenmann at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture opened the door to a small tour throughout the state, which then turned into a larger tour throughout the country. 

On the heels of Farmscape, I received a grant to write another play about immigrant farmers called Vang. And on the heels of Vang, I was commissioned by Practical Farmers of Iowa to write yet another play, called Map of my Kingdom, about farmland transition. It toured coast-to-coast. 

After each performance, we had a talkback, allowing audience members to vocalize their reactions to the dramas. All three plays got audiences talking about very real issues in agriculture—from the Farm Crisis, to the agricultural knowledge immigrants bring to this country, to the joys and problems of passing on private property throughout generations. Audience members shared their stories, Big Ag and Small. One man broke down and cried about losing his farm in the 1980s. A woman held up her arm to show where her elbow had been shot off when she was leaving on one of the last boats out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. A woman stood and asked if there was a lawyer in the house who could help mend her feuding family over their farmland transition.

Back at ISU, I visited with Kirschenmann about the dialogue arising from the plays.

“I’ve had emails from people all over the US, telling me that they’ve changed the whole way they’re eating after seeing Farmscape,” I said. “And audience members tell me they thought all immigrants were illegal before they saw Vang. I’ve had women express how much they wanted to farm, but their family tradition excluded them.”

“I’m wondering if we couldn’t start an organization to encourage more dialogue between the arts and agriculture,” Kirschenmann said. “I know they are strange bedfellows, but I think the arts will be what opens our eyes to the subject of agriculture.”

We began with a campus group, inviting students and community members to participate from journalism to landscape architecture, music to agronomy. Soon, we were hosting guest speakers and giving out small grants for events as diverse as exhibits of farm women’s aprons to the botanical drawings of George Washington Carver. I left ISU in 2016, took AgArts with me to Kalona, applied for 501(c)3 status, and set up a storefront office in 2020.

Current Programs
Once I moved to my new location in the middle of the Old Order Amish settlement, I set up Farm-to-Artist Residencies. In this unique program, farms throughout the US host artists for one week to one month. The artists get to know the farmers, their agricultural issues, and their conservation and regenerative practices. The artists then incorporate this agricultural knowledge into their own creative work, and within a year of the residency, they produce a piece of art that is a reflection of direct, hands-on experience and observation of farming.

To kick off the program, I brought the Connemara Lads, a traditional Irish duo of flute and accordion, from the West coast of Ireland to reside for two weeks on the “East coast” of Iowa. The New Hope Farm is nestled in the Driftless Region of the state: rough, hilly, non-glaciated terrain, with a fresh, clear trout stream running through the property. A large vegetable garden, milk cows, sheep, a friendly dog and cat, and an engaging family greeted the Lads. 

Mornings were filled with music drifting out of the guest house, washing over the farm and the valley. During their stay, the Lads became familiar not only with diversified farming techniques, but with the philosophy behind New Hope. Based on the work of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, Worker Farms were established to practice diversified agriculture, provide hospitality to those in need, and help the poor. At the end of their residency, the Lads composed a tune for the farm and toured throughout the state.

Soon, other AgArts farms came on board. The River House at Whiterock Conservancy near Coon Rapids, Iowa, hosted a stream of writers, painters, actors, musicians, and dancers. Ellie Goudie-Averill choreographed and performed a new piece in the River House barn that once held community dances during the Depression. Annie Chapman Brewer composed a piece for French horn echoing the sounds of wildlife surrounding her at Whiterock. She performed it at a major event at Whiterock, celebrating Land Transition and the Des Moines Metropolitan Opera’s adaptation of Jane Smiley’s book A Thousand Acres.

AgArts now has a network of farms throughout Iowa, Nebraska, and New York State. Both artists and farmers apply for this program through our website, discovering our programming through booths at conferences, social media sites, newspaper articles, and word of mouth. 

Artists have published poems and articles, videoed dance performances, performed concerts, and painted canvases in response to their residencies. The artists have learned about restoring prairie and wetlands, energy conservation, no-till planting, cover crops, food forests, and new models of distribution of products such as CSAs. In return, the farmers have enjoyed the energy of hosting artists and learned about some of the joys and complexities of the creative arts.

AgArts pays each farmer a stipend for a residency. It pays each artist’s room, board, and often travel while they are in residency.  

AgArts also produces AgArts from Horse and Buggy Land, a bimonthly, thirty-minute podcast that focuses on the Amish, sustainability, and the wider rural environment. Buggy Land is available wherever you get your podcasts (Apple, Spotify, etc.). I host the podcast from a fictional Freemartin Town, including monologues of “my” life among the Amish; storytelling by other farmers; interviews with folk artists and agricultural experts; and accompanying folk, blues, jazz and classical music. Douglas Burns, a well-known state journalist, has called AgArts from Horse & Buggy Land “Prairie Home Companion without the sexual harassment.” 

Buggy Land raises money through Supercast memberships. It encourages audience participation through contests and call-in comments recorded on Speak Pipe.

Communications
In addition to the window display and podcast, AgArts connects with the public through booths and panel presentations at agricultural and artistic conferences and events. We teach online classes in poetry and nonfiction, and publish creative writing and artwork through our online journal The Blazing Star. AgArts maintains an active website where podcasts are posted, contests are announced, and artist-in-residence projects are displayed. Examples of art projects include Farm Art Zine by Jean Graham, River House on the Prairie by Annie Chapman Brewer, and Pie and Tornadoes by Buzz Masters. AgArts also cultivates an audience on social media, and sends special announcements in an email newsletter. We have been interviewed and profiled in local media, on public and community radio stations, and on national podcasts. 

Affiliations
Central College in Pella, Iowa, partners with AgArts to provide a hands-on learning experience for its students. Central has sent interns to AgArts to help with grant writing, advertising copy, newsletters, and podcast commentary. Interns have also staffed conference booths and performance sites. 

I have given talks and workshops on AgArts for the ISU Sustainable Agricultural Program, Practical Farmers of Iowa, and The Center for Rural Affairs. We have worked with the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT) and Writing the Land in Massachusetts. We have worked with staff at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum in Michigan and the Climate Museum in New York City. I am an emerita ISU Distinguished Professor, and a well-published, award-winning writer, with nine books from major publishers. I’ve toured plays across the country and abroad. I have dual citizenship with the US and Ireland, opening connections to the artistic community throughout the world. My website is maryswander.com. 

Diversity Initiatives
AgArts seeks diverse staffing and participation in all our programming. Through the Cynipid Fund, we are working nationally and internationally to continue these efforts. Currently, we are working with the Meskwaki Settlement on a chicken dance for the dedication of a new farm for the Iowa Prairie Center, an urban farm residency, and the hosting of more international artists-in-residence. 

The AgArts Executive Director is disabled, and the studio is fully accessible to people with disabilities. We transcribe many of our podcasts and post this printed material on our website to connect with the deaf community. 

Long-Range Goals
In the future, we hope to raise more funding to increase staffing. New staff members will help extend the range of our residencies and increase the listenership of our podcasts. We hope to do more work with diversity, increasing residencies for both international artists and people of difference. We hope to grow our podcast listenership to wider, English-speaking communities throughout the world.

In addition to living among the Amish in Iowa and the Hispanic community in New Mexico, I have done major projects with both the blind and deaf communities, immigrants, and the Meskwaki Settlement. I have taught poetry in inner-city schools. I have had a study abroad course in creative writing, teaching in the schools in Trinidad and Tobago. I would like to brainstorm with some of my contacts in these communities to involve them in increasing diversity in AgArts.

The online memoir class has been especially successful. At this point, two students have received book contracts. I would like to transform this class material into a series of lectures that would be available on the website for a fee to generate a passive stream of income. 

We hope to develop the Blazing Star Journal presence in the small magazine community with annual awards, key interviews, and the publication of dynamic writing that blends the topics of arts and agriculture. 

Support
AgArts has received grants from the Iowa Arts Council, the Cynipid Fund, the Werner-Ellithorp Fund at the Oregon Community Foundation, and the Kallio-Levine Fund. In addition, we’ve raised money with Facebook fundraisers and an annual private donor campaign. Any additional support is welcome to help us meet our goals at this exciting and expanding nonprofit.