Half-Ton Butter Sculpture Highlights 2022 Farm Show

Carved from a half-ton of butter, the 2022 Pennsylvania Farm Show butter sculpture highlights this year’s theme of Harvesting More. The farm show runs Jan. 8-15, 2022.

The sculpture, a longtime PA Farm Show staple that celebrates Pennsylvania’s nearly 5,400 dairy farmers, highlights that there is strength in diversity and unity. Pennsylvania agriculture is present all across the commonwealth – on rural acres and in vacant city lots – and it’s all essential to ensuring the availability and accessibility of food for all.

“Over the past 22 months we have learned we are stronger and more resilient through our combined efforts to feed the commonwealth,” said Redding. “We are Harvesting More, together, to provide for Pennsylvanians through good times and bad. It takes all of us working together to ensure a bountiful, food-secure, and sustainable world.”

The sculpture, sponsored by American Dairy Association North East (ADANE), features urban and rural agriculturalists coming together by toasting glasses of milk. The sculptors, Jim Victor and Marie Pelton, began work in mid-December to craft the work of art from butter donated by Land O’ Lakes in Carlisle, Cumberland County.

“The butter sculpture is a creative way to highlight the state’s dedicated dairy farmers and the important role agriculture plays in our lives,” said dairy farmer Casandra Long of Doodle-A-Long Farms in Spring City, Pa. “Producing nutritious milk and dairy products and feeding people is what I love most about being a dairy farmer.”

Recognizing that all agriculture is critical and improving infrastructure for hyper-local food production in cities was essential to addressing the food apartheid that exacerbates issues faced by low-income communities and communities of color, Governor Tom Wolf has made historic investments in urban agriculture infrastructure through the Pennsylvania Farm Bill​, signed into law in 2019. Since ​that time, the Wolf Administration has invested more than $1.52 million in urban agriculture which has leveraged an additional $1.52 million in local investments through matching dollars.