It’s not every day that lifelong Wisconsin farmers take time out during the frenetic harvest season to do pirouettes and turns in their tractors like so many John Deere Baryshnikovs.
“The Hay Rake Ballet” in an alfalfa field — set to opera music in front of a rapt crowd who oohed and aahed at every lift of the rakes used to move hay into rows — was a hit of the Farm/Art DTour, a 10-day, 50-mile self-guided driving tour of large-scale art installations and “pasture performances” along the pristine, hilly back roads of rural Sauk County, Wis.
Held every other October, the DTour draws more than 20,000 “D-Tourists” from Madison, Milwaukee and beyond. They come to soak up art in surprising contexts — a screaming pink abstract deer blind hoisted above a corn field, for instance, or a plucky dragon concealing a 250-foot-long irrigation system.
“I think it’s neat that urban people get a kick out of what we see every day,” said Andy Enge, a dairy farmer and a star of the ballet, in which three tractors twirled around one another in a pas de trois.
His 93-year-old father, Maurice, saw it differently. “If a man drove like that out in the hayfields, I’d fire them!” he said.
The route meanders along ribbony roads, past one-tavern villages and red barn farmsteads. Visitors pick up a map with 40 stops, including 15 art installations, pithy roadside poetry and “Field Notes” about soil and other land features. Red directional signs mark the trail, but getting lost — County Road C, to PF, to E — is part of the charm.
Artists like Jongil Ma, who drove from Brooklyn in a U-Haul, collaborate with local farmers. Ma’s “Earth, Wind & Sky” was a sculptural gymnastics show of colorful, swooping strips of wood straddling hay wagons. These were borrowed from Tim Hennings, whose Czechoslovak great-grandparents built his farm 109 years ago.
Richard and Kitty Henn, from nearby Sauk City, thought Ma’s work looked like a roller coaster. “It’s a chance to be in an area we ignore,” Richard Henn said. “It’s taking time to look at what the countryside is all about.”
The idea of the DTour, now in its 10th year, is to celebrate the “culture” in agriculture, using art to highlight both the region’s farming heritage and its deep attachment to, and care for, the land. Sauk County is home to the historic farm of Aldo Leopold, the naturalist and conservationist who wrote “A Sand County Almanac,” an ode to the ecology of Wisconsin’s landscape. Western Sauk County belongs to the “Driftless area,” the unglaciated swath of the Upper Midwest whose characteristic sandstone bluffs and up-and-down terrain serve as the DTour’s picturesque backdrop.
The event’s founders, Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas, are two stowaways from Chicago — she was in theater and he was a sculptor — who bought a farm in Reedsburg (population 10,000) in 1993 and started a community-supported agriculture program. “We were as green as grass,” Salinas recalled. A fledgling artist residency program evolved into the nonprofit Wormfarm Institute, which spearheads the DTour and other programs. Each jury-selected artist receives an honorarium of up to $10,000.
Farmers participate out of the goodness of their hearts. “We get nothing, but it breaks up the monotony of farming,” said Todd Statz, who hosted Gabriela Jimenez Marvan and her binational Mexican Folk Art Collective, which erected exuberant monotony-busting spirit animals, or alebijes, a la the movie “Coco.”
This year’s DTour is expected to infuse $3 million to $5 million into the local economy, said Thomas Cox, the executive director of the Sauk County Development Corporation. Beloved local institutions like the Tower Rock Bakery and the Veggie Emporium try to prepare for the D-tourist deluge. “Before, it was someone from Madison stopping by after visiting the state park,” said Jacque Enge of the Veggie Emporium, who grows 22 varieties of peppers and other vegetables with her husband, Dan. “We’ve really scaled up.”
There was much for non-Wisconsinites to absorb, including the subtleties of cheese curds. “They squeak when warm,” said Connie Lehman, who was selling cold ones at the Honey Creek Rod & Gun Club in tiny Leland. “If you show up at the cheese factory at 10 a.m., they’re really special.”
Like the weather vanes perched on barns, Sauk County is known for predicting which way the political winds blow: In 2016, Donald Trump edged out Hillary Clinton by 109 votes; in 2020, he lost to Biden by 615. The so-called urban/rural divide was evident on the DTour with yard signs that leaned more toward Trump the deeper into farmland you drove.
“If a legislator spent the day walking in a farmer’s shoes, they’d be surprised,” said Carol Ederer, whose 850-acre family farm is more than a century old. Lighting bills can run up to $4,000 a month. “I sit at the kitchen table with the envelope praying to God, please be small,” she said.
One of the most striking art installations, “Preserve,” was on one of the Ederers’ fields. Built by three female artists from Illinois, it evoked the shack Aldo Leopold made from a chicken coop in the 1930s. Their chicken-wire and wood structure was lined with 1,000 canning jars, each containing an image on translucent plastic of butterflies, mushrooms and other local species. “You get a sense of how much of life around us we could lose,” said Cathy McCauley, one of the artists.
Reuben Ederer, 28, wasn’t sure what to make of what he called “the chicken coop look.” The “artwork” he prizes most is his Case IH Combine, a massive piece of machinery he uses to harvest his crops. “Farmers get a bad rap because we’re outnumbered,” he said. “We take care of the land and the cattle because they take care of us. They’ve made us a life.”
One of the goals of the DTour is to reimagine the urban-rural divide as an urban-rural continuum, using art as a bridge toward finding common ground.
“It makes us see our place differently,” said Curt Meine, a Wisconsin conservationist and writer. “You’ve driven down the road a thousand times. But the art allows us to see it through a fresh lens.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company
