The Farm Art Festival Where You Can See Tractors Do Ballet

SAUK COUNTY, Wis. — A small crowd stood at the edge of a wide hayfield as opera music blared across the rural Wisconsin expanse. A combination of giggles and breathless wonder took hold of the audience, mesmerized while three stoic tractors began revving their engines in choreographed unison. They made swirling synchronized figure eights across the field and lifted their spiked hay rakes in a graceful port de bras. Each tractor pirouetted and twirled in a dazzling solo before the drivers hopped out and ran forward to bow as the public threw roses and cheered. Some even shed a couple of tears. 

The world’s first ever “Hay Rake Ballet” was a high point of what may be the last iteration of Farm/Art DTour, a 50-mile circuit of temporary art installations that has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to the farmlands of Sauk County since 2011. Produced by Wormfarm Institute, a local farm-turned-art center that has garnered national and international attention over the past 25 years, the event invites visitors from near and far to deepen their appreciation for food chains and food workers while reveling in nature’s beauty through art. 

This year’s juried exhibitions included a pair of Mexican alebrijes by Gabriela Jiménez Marván and Ryan Rothweiler, who come from Cuernavaca, Mexico and Milwaukee, respectively, and now live in the small western Wisconsin town of Viroqua. The two mythical creatures depicted in bright colors and intricate patterns take visitors utterly by surprise as they turn a corner in a road lined by red farm houses. A few miles down the road, flowing transparent white fabric covers a barn that withstood an 1870s tornado — a subtle and poetic installation by Chicago artist Catherine Schwalbe, which draws visitors’ attention to a remarkable but understated building it would be all too easy to overlook. 

Impossible to overlook, on the other hand, is the over 100-foot-long (30.5-meter) dragon fashioned by Alicia Cosnahan, Brian Sobaski, Peter Krsko, and Tory Tepp ​​completely out of farm equipment and materials, which literally grows out of the irrigation system extended over the vast cornfield. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Wormfarm Executive Director Donna Neuwirth expressed her delight in the “unexpected.” 

“If you expect to see just a cornfield, you might not notice it. But if there’s something that interrupts that cornfield, it makes you do a double take,” she said. At the top of Wormfarm’s website are the words of former Wisconsin poet laureate Max Garland: “Art amplifies what landscape quietly asserts.”

Neuwirth told Hyperallergic that DTour’s visitors are split evenly across rural and urban areas.. Everyone has the chance to experience the place in a new way — through the art, through the “field notes” scattered along the route that offer background on the history and science of the rural landscape, and most of all through meeting each other. The DTour’s maps and wayfinding signs direct visitors to local vendors and points of interest along the way, and the central “Food Chain” gathering place at the historic Witwen Park lets country folk and city dwellers mingle over cold beer brewed locally and tacos made by Latine members of the local Knights of Columbus. And they might even get the chance to chat with renowned local conservation biologist Curt Meine, who talks passionately about the local apple revitalization project and shares his decades of experience navigating the rural-urban divide. 

The DTour seeks to question that divide — and, likewise, the dichotomy between “farmers” and “artists.” Over the past four years, land artist Tori Tepp and farm hosts William and Alma Gasser have collaborated on “Sauk County ARK,” a wooden ship rising out of a field of an experimental grain called Kernza, which could point the way toward a more sustainable local economy and ecology. For the tractor ballet, Berlin-based artist Sarah Butler choreographed moving performances by local farmers Andy Enge, Darin Rosenbaum, and Brian Markley that uplift their work at a time when family farms in the area are increasingly under threat by large dairy corporations. 

“It’s not every day that these farmers are driving and doing pirouettes with the tractors,” said Butler in an interview with Hyperallergic. “But nothing I was asking them to do was something they don’t do every day. It was really cool to see these three guys who are total masters of their craft being celebrated by their own community, as well as people visiting who are coming to see the DTour … for things they do every day that are oftentimes not really recognized as art.” 

Enge, one of the farmer-performers, was approached by Butler less than a month before the first show. 

“I’m farming, minding my own business, and my nephew comes out and says, ‘Sarah Butler wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “When she asked me, I was like, ‘What are you talking about? You want the rake to bounce in the air or something?’” A big reason Enge said yes was that Butler wasn’t a stranger: They had met during the previous DTour in 2022.

While some farmers refused to take part and one even backed out during rehearsals, Enge said he and his two fellow performers were exhilarated. “Seeing the joy in the other drivers and in the crowd … it really touched me.” On the drive home one of the other farmers told Enge, “Hey, if they’re going to do it again, count me in.”

The experience brought Butler and Enge closer. “He taught me how to drive a tractor yesterday, so I got to practice my own solo,” she said, comparing the experience to working behind the scenes on any major performance. “We built something together. Other than the fact that we’re in a field and there are three farmers, it didn’t feel different than if I’m at an opera house working with a company,” she said.” 

These are the kinds of connections the DTour — and all of Wormfarm’s programming — sets out to build, in part by intentionally challenging visitors’ and participants’ assumptions about the “rural-urban” or “red-blue” divide. Sauk County, among the most “purple” in the nation, is often posited as a bellwether ahead of major elections, like the one a few weeks away. Politically curious visitors from the coasts and major cities who come expecting bitter division are met with something more nuanced and complex — but also a lot more fun. 

“You know, people who are visiting think that they know who rural people are,” Neuwirth says. “But all individual humans have the ability to be surprised and curious. I think that’s exactly what we’re after.”