Improvements will help Oliver Kelley farm tell the story of farming

written by Jonathan Eisenthal 

With a $10.5 million appropriation from the 2014 bonding bill, the 1870 Oliver H. Kelley farm can afford its first major expansion in 30 years.

The expansion will include a new visitor’s center, farm buildings, two updated classrooms, a community room, a kitchen classroom and and an all-season picnic shelter. The improvements, scheduled to be finished in May 2016, are aimed at better serving the huge volume of visitors to Minnesota’s unique farm historic site. The farm will remain open during construction.

“What we’re trying to do is to tell the story of food, from farm to table — yesterday, today and tomorrow,” said David Kelliher, director of public policy for Minnesota Historical Society. “We realize we can’t do this all by ourselves. We have this concept of having program partners come in and talk about what they do and what some of the current issues are. It’s one of our goals to get out of the 1870s and try to make this whole endeavor tie into what is happening today. Making it more relevant to today’s issues like ‘where does my food come from?’”

Situated on banks of the Mississippi River in Elk River, northwest of Minneapolis, the farm has served 66 school districts in the past 20 years. Of 480,000 visitors in that time, 240,000 were children on school field trips.

Kelliher said that the Historical Society would invite groups like the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, to work in partnership with the historical society to program events.

“For example, we might have the corn growers come in and put on ‘Corn Weekend,’ and the group would have members come and staff the event, to talk about what it’s like to be a farmer, what the issues are in corn growing today,” Kelliher said. “We could have similar programs with sugar beet growers, pig farmers, and all the other segments of Minnesota’s agriculture.”

The US Department of the Interior has recognized the Oliver H. Kelley farm as a National Historic Landmark — the highest designation of historical significance, because Kelley was a key figure in the “Grange Movement” — a social and economic association for farmers that arose just after the Civil War. Today’s farmer-membership groups therefore have a deep connection to the historic significance of the farm.

“The core of our program will always be the historic farm, but we’re also looking for ways to extend our reach,” said Kelliher. “We have a kitchen garden with heirloom crops like tomatoes that people put up for storage in the 19th century; we have the breeds of pigs and sheep that were common then, but we will also have modern crops. We will have some kind of machinery hill out on the landscape for people to explore, and make the comparison between the threshing machines of the early 1900s and the modern combine.”

A ‘guest animal’ facility will allow livestock farmers to bring and show their animals to school groups and other visitors.

The Oliver Kelley farm has also  developed partnerships with the Minnesota Science Museum and Connors Prairie in Indiana, joining together to win a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop curricula for math and science learning through hands on, interactive agricultural sites.

“We know that the ag world needs a lot of people who do work beyond being a farmer on the ground,” Kelliher said. “You need people to do biotech, you need inventors, workers of all kinds. Being so close to the Twin Cities metro area, with a population of nearly 3 million people, we have a great opportunity to have kids from the Cities, who don’t have a clue where their food comes from, come out and learn all about that, while they get a breath of fresh air and have a very positive experience with agriculture.”