SKY HIGH FARM: WHERE FASHION MEETS FOOD IN UPSTATE NEW YORK
Sky High Farm is a non-profit, a regenerative farm, a fashion label and recently, a Parley collaborator
“How do you speak to somebody who might not want to hear it? You can convert them by making something really cool.”
Matty Friedman
In upstate New York there’s a unique farm on 40 acres of land that operates with the central mission of ‘generating pathways to food sovereignty”. This means donating 100% of its produce and livestock to marginalized communities, administering $350K in grants globally to individuals and/or organizations working in agriculture, food justice, and/or land sovereignty, offering a 9-month residential paid educational work experience for an annual group of Fellows to receive comprehensive agricultural training focused on vegetable production and livestock management, and designing educational youth programming. It’s a lot!
Sky High Farm was founded twelve years ago by the artist Dan Colen, who initially believed that the land he’d bought after a period of commercial success would be used to build a sculpture studio. However, he soon realized that this land was an opportunity – not just for himself but for other people, specifically those who have no access to healthy, nutritious fresh food. Over a decade later, the farm - now formally a 501(c)(3) led by co- Executive Directors Joshua Bardfield and Sarah Workneh, has evolved exponentially. With the goal of powering the nonprofit’s work through the generation of sustaining revenue and advocacy, Sky High Farm Universe was established to propose a new model for business. Inspired by the work of the nonprofit, the brand responsibly creates products across fashion, beauty, and food & beverage and experiential events that harnesses collaboration with culture’s leading figures and brands to deliver the farm’s work to the heart of the dialogue. Its business centers the work of the farm through an upfront donation required of all retailers - to date $500K has been raised through the Wholesale Donation Program - and once profitable will donate 50% of profits to the nonprofit.
In 2022, a study showed that one in eight Americans (an estimated 44.2 million people) suffer from food insecurity, or do not have access to an affordable, healthy diet. As of today, the farm has donated over 160,000 pounds of high quality, nutritious food to underprivileged communities, using ecologically responsible methods to take care of the land.
Sky High Farm Universe is the fashion label that helps to sustain the work done on a farm, one that’s made a splash within the industry, partly owing to the A-list creative collaborators that they’ve pulled into their world like Tremaine Emory, Quil Lemons, Mel Ottenberg and Alastair McKimm, partly because Dover Street Market helped them bring the brand to market, but mainly because the clothes are fun, punchy and wearable. “The brand exists across several categories of which fashion was really the first that we stepped into,” says Sky High Farm Universe co-founder and CEO Daphne Seybold, who left her job at Dover Street and Comme Des Garçons to found the business in early 2022 “It happened very organically, through Dover Street Market,” explains Seybold. “They have an incubator with maybe 14 or 15 brands and they help bring those emerging brands to market using their expertise and manufacturing capabilities. They can help you get into the best shops in the world. We started off by doing a few volunteer, 100%-for-charity projects with Dover Street while I was still working there in 2019. Then we saw that there was an opportunity to really expand upon some of those early charitable projects – there was such a rich response to the icons and the work that had already been created and used by the farm for many years. So Dan and I linked up, I quit my job at CDG and Dover Street, and they effectively became our manufacturing partner on a seasonal collection that’s primarily made of dead stock and upcycled fabrics.”
“The clothing and the company itself are designed to raise as much money as possible to give away.”
Daphne Seybold
The label exists to service the farm and the communities that benefit from it – Seybold speaks passionately about how the farm can play a role in addressing the inequality that exists in America when it comes to the human rights issue of food. “We've come to see the food access piece as part of a bigger sovereignty mission and about equity in the food system,” she says. “I think there are a lot of organizations that are busy watering the fruit and not the root, which is to say, if you're really serious about creating food systems change, you actually have to look at the equity piece as a part of it. The farm takes a very unique approach in that their goal is to provide equitable access to the food system. Through an international grants program, administered by an independent committee comprised of individuals who come from the communities the farm serves, it distributes $350K yearly ro regenerative farmers who are practicing this kind of farming, those who are essentially already doing the work – oftentimes these are farmers are unseen and exist in opposition to their governments. They certainly don't benefit from the subsidies that “big ag” receives. They’ve granted $600,000 in the last two years, so you can see how ambitious they’re being with this; they’re trying to eliminate the barriers to accessing the funds to do this work as much as possible.”
Matty Friedman is the Senior Brand and Product Manager at Sky High Farm Universe, another ex-Dover Street Market employee who has since become a key part of the Sky High Farm mission. We’re stood together at the Parley booth inside the bustling Future Fabrics Expo, where the new Sky High Farm Universe and Parley collaboration is on display and attracting a lot of attention. It’s a capsule collection created using Parley Ocean Plastic and materials from our partners in the Parley Future Material® network – Bananatex, Ponda, TômTex and Nature Coatings, all of whom produce revolutionary, non-hazardous biomaterials. Radical manufacturing techniques aside, it looks and feels fantastic – and no, I’m not just biased. When discussing Sky High Farm Universe, Friedman talks about a “Trojan horse approach”. Their model is to attract people with desirable, coveted products and then all of a sudden they’re in a conversation about food insecurity.
“I don't want to be pessimistic about the world, but some people don't understand or care about these issues,” he says. “But they care about products, so how do you speak to somebody who might not want to hear it? You can convert them by making something really cool. I used to joke around about ‘saving the world one T-shirt at a time‘ and now we're really trying to do something along those lines, to make a mission-driven brand that's really dedicated to it.”
The brand has collaborated with a lot of different heavy hitters in the fashion industry, including Nike, Balenciaga and Supreme, along with major players in the art world like Raymond Pettibon and Takashi Murakami. “We wanted to engage with as many people as we could that were key stakeholders in the coolest industries because that's how you spark change – you get people who people admire and you work with them,” says Friedman. “We're not limiting ourselves to just fashion, we can go wherever we want. The first step is workwear, we launched food and beverage last year and now we are moving into beauty. I see this as a full lifestyle brand that spans into many different categories and changes the way that people consume and think about how they buy products. Since we're a mission-driven brand, it feels natural to be working in all of these different spaces at the same time. So it's cool that we can work with Converse, we can work with Nike, but we can also work with Balenciaga, we can work with Levi's, we can work with North Face. And it all feels natural because people are like, ‘Oh wow, they're working with a brand that supports a farm, they're working to fight for food security’. It's a very interesting thing that I don't think has existed before. And hopefully people can follow in what we're doing and build brands that are mission driven from the core.”
Once profitable, 50% of all Sky High Farm Universe’s profits go back to the farm. As Seybold explains, “the clothing and the company itself are designed to raise as much money as possible to give away.” Using the proceeds that they’ve generated, Sky High Farm offers a fellowship program for people who are interested in taking on food systems jobs but have no prior experience in agriculture, an industry that requires highly skilled labor. It's seven months on the land for the whole growing season, and then it's a two to three month research project thereafter,” says Seybold. “The goal is to imbue people with the skills that they need to then convincingly go out and take on these jobs. Otherwise it's impossible to break through to the industry. We also do a lot of educational programming, primarily with many of the communities that we're already in dialogue with and serving. I'm not running the farm in any regard but the point is to illustrate that as we are building the brand, we're informed by this unique constitution of community-first, community-centered work that the farm has already engaged in for well over a decade.” The Sky High Farm approach is one that chimes with the work that we’ve been doing at Parley for over a decade – lifting up local communities, understanding the power of culture as a vehicle for political messages and shifting narratives around how the world could, and should be. Partnering with them made total sense. As of now, the capsule collection that we made with Sky High Farm Universe using Parley Future Material® isn’t yet available for purchase, but the teams are working on bringing it to the market in the near future. Watch this space!
Farm imagery courtesy of Ryan McGinley and Artemisia Grasso
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