Sky High Farm
A healthy planet is impossible without healthy people. Sky High Farm believes everyone has the right to nourishing food that is familiar and comforting, and to the resources they need to grow that food themselves. They see providing all people — especially those with historic barriers to capital, land, and status — with the tools to build their own agricultural systems, as the path towards a resilient and equitable future of food.
Sky High Farm is creating a more equitable food system through stewardship of land, resources, and community engagement.
Sky High Farm was founded in 2012 by childhood friends Dan Colen and Josh Bardfield, an artist and a public health professional, respectively. For the first eight years of operation, Sky High focused primarily on food access, donating 100% of protein and vegetables raised on the farm to local partners. In 2020, as the pandemic shined a harsh spotlight on the reality of food insecurity in America and its relationship to systemic inequity in our food and agricultural systems, the farm’s pursuit of the mission to ensure everyone has access to the resources they need to sustain themselves, expanded to include building meaningful pathways to food sovereignty. This has taken the shape of a number of newly developed programs - farmer training, grants, youth education - centered on investing in like minded communities and individuals to proliferate a new vision for local food systems, where people collectively define their food system and the policies that underpin it, with sovereignty at the center.
-
![34 million]()
34 million Americans have experienced food insecurity in the last year.
-
![100%]()
Since its founding Sky High Farm has donated 100% of the vegetables and protein raised on the farm to food access partners throughout New York State.
-
![165k lbs]()
Over the last decade Sky High Farm donated over 100,000 lbs of veggies and 65,000 lbs of animal protein.
-
![350 thousand dollars]()
$350,000+ redistributed to farmers and food justice advocates across the US and the globe through Sky High Farm Grants.
The next generation of farmers will determine how our world will look, taste and feel.
-
-
Lexie Smith
Program Manager
-
Why This Matters
The solutions to a climate catastrophe exist within the innate intelligence of plants, land, and the people connected to both. The obstacles created by systemic inequity must be overcome to reach these ideas. Sky High Farm believes a food system designed with this understanding creates greater opportunity for physical and emotional wellbeing, lasting education, stable housing, and job opportunities for all.
-
What You Can Do
Plant your seeds. Feed your neighbor. Learn how Sky High Farm is working to find immediate and long-term solutions to food insecurity in New York and beyond.
