There are farms that grow vegetables, and there are farms that grow ideas. Seed Song Farm in Kingston has spent the past decade trying—deliberately, sometimes imperfectly—to do both.
“This is our 10th year,” says founder Creek Iversen, before immediately qualifying the milestone. “There’s kind of different ways to interpret that—we had our first growing season in 2017, but 2016 was when we had a greenhouse, we planted garlic, we started having an event or two.” However you count it, the project has been less a clean launch than a gradual unfolding.
At the center of Iversen’s vision is a simple but expansive idea: “the public interaction with the land, sort of like this dance between people and their environment.” Farming, in this framework, is less an end than a medium. “That’s how culture evolves,” Iversen says. “That’s how folk culture and folk music and folk dancing—it’s all specialized based on where you are and the special, unique things about your land.”
Seed Song has spent a decade testing that premise in real time. The result is a sprawling enterprise that resists easy categorization. “It’s an education center and a farm and a kind of a cultural venue hopefully all wrapped together,” Iversen says, acknowledging that the hybridity can read as a lack of polish. “Sometimes it can look a little sloppy, and people probably think it’s not organized enough.” But, he adds, “it’s been just dialed in enough to move all these things forward.”
Those forward movements are tangible. “I cover cropped 50 acres last year,” he notes, describing efforts to build soil health. “We’ve planted thousands of trees at this point.” Some are in native-species zones; others are part of a developing food forest. “We have an orchard which is now producing hazelnuts and berries and its first apples and peaches, and eventually it’ll also have pawpaws and persimmons,” Iversen says.
Just as central is the human ecosystem. The farm’s summer camp has become a key access point, with many participants attending on scholarship. “Sometimes 40 percent or more of the kids are there on scholarship and are from underserved places in the community,” Iversen says. The aim is not just agricultural literacy, but something more foundational: “learning this style of interaction with the land.”
That emphasis on interaction has roots in Iversen’s earlier work with the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. “Connecting people with their place and celebrating it,” he says, drawing a direct line between river and farm. “People developed this feeling for it, love for it, and so everyone worked to clean it up and treat it better and revere it.” Seed Song, in his telling, is an attempt to replicate that dynamic on land.
Over time, that connection has generated its own forms of culture. “There’s original skits and songs that have been written and are performed regularly at the farm,” he says, citing one about the Indigenous “Three Sisters” planting method and another centered on pollinators and trees. “It’s part of a cultural tradition now.”
Ten years in, Iversen sees those strands—agriculture, education, culture—not as separate programs but as evidence that the original idea is working. “We’ve kind of really done a lot to fulfill the mission of the place,” he says. “Which is to return a reverence to the land so that communities are really treasuring their land and its resources.”
The next phase is about giving that mission a more durable physical form. “Our biggest goals would be to become financially sustainable and stable,” he says, noting that recent setbacks—including the loss of key events last fall—exposed how precarious the current model can be.
At the same time, the ambition is expanding. “We want an actual legit place to enact this work,” he says—an agroecology center that can “tell the story of the land that we’re on.” That story, as he describes it, stretches from Indigenous agriculture to Dutch settlement to contemporary immigrant farming, all shaped by the fertile floodplains of the Esopus and Hudson. “Ulster County doesn’t really have a place where the main thing that caused so much history and cultural motion is being told.”
For now, 2026 is a transitional year. “It’s a bit of a reset year,” Iversen says, before catching himself. “Reset might be the wrong word. It’s like the next evolution.” Agricultural production will ease slightly to make room for new initiatives: an interpretive center, expanded reforestation, and a large-scale medicine wheel installation tied to Indigenous knowledge systems.
Even in this “reset,” the calendar is full. Summer camp returns. Community plots expand. The CSA is shifting toward what Iversen calls “more of a gift economy model”—“some kind of little party every week where people will come and help out, take produce, pay if that’s their way…or do other things if it’s not.”
And in September, a signature event will bring together workshops, music, and hands-on learning across the farm.
Ten years in, Seed Song remains a work in progress—by design. “It’s a very sprawling enterprise,” Iversen says. But if the edges are still rough, the core idea has held: bring people into contact with the land, and something larger begins to take root.
Seed Song Farm is located at 160 Esopus Avenue in Kingston. Visit its website for spring and summer camp registration; store, plant, and produce sales updates; farm events and workshops; and volunteer opportunities.
