A Movable Feast

Dan Colen is not afraid of going from zero to a hundred. When the celebrated contemporary artist moved to Pine Plains, New York, in 2011 to escape New York City, he turned his 40 acres of empty land into a farm, even though he had no real agricultural knowledge at the time.
 

“The land was just weeds—I couldn’t interact with it. I wanted to use the land, but I didn’t want to manage another business [in addition to my art],” explains Colen, who still has a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. “I set up this farm with so little intentionality. It really came together one year at a time.”

Intentional or otherwise, Colen has a gift for both artistic and agrarian creation: He has built a sustainable entity, Sky High Farm, which has a real impact on neighboring food­insecurity issues. The farm has nonprofit status and, in 2017, donated 31,400 pounds of food, or 26,166 meals, to food banks in northeastern New York and New York City. These days, Colen can speak about rotational grazing and husbandry with uncanny ease.