“I’m captivated by the people who are working in agriculture,” said Walter Hergt, a photographer, videographer, and multimedia artist based in Millerton.
“I worked in construction for over 15 years and agricultural work is so much harder. There’s nothing discreet about it. You live it. You have to have love, care, motivation, and determination to pursue this life, creating food and a landscape that is healthy and vital.”
Hergt’s work explores the relationships that farmers have with their land, livestock, communities, and one another. In photos, videos, film, and multimedia projects, he uses oral history techniques to present people are narrators of their lives on farms, not mere subjects for the camera.
“Where we live is beautiful, but it’s important to me that I foreground how people are going about doing this important work rather than just create something pretty,” he said.
His projects are often funded by nonprofit organizations to help farms communicate their missions. Over the past decade, he has worked with many Hudson Valley farms, including three in the Pine Plains area: Chaseholm Farm, Rock Steady Farm, and Sky High Farm.
Hergt grew up in rural Michigan and earned a degree in environmental policy and social behavior from the University of Michigan. After college, he worked at a food co-op and on several vegetable farms in Vermont before shifting into energy-efficient home renovation and a 15-year career in construction.
But something was missing.
“Managing client relationships wasn’t really what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said. “And photography had always been part of my life, since I took my first photography class in junior high,” he said. He left construction, moved to New York and earned a master’s degree from CUNY in political science — though in hindsight, he said he wishes he had pursued cultural geography in an anthropology department instead.
In 2011, he relocated to Millerton and began seeking a new career path. A two-week Oral History Summer School led by Suzanne Snider in Hudson provided a breakthrough. “That course was instrumental,” he said. “It really cemented the path for me.”
Hergt first connected with Sarah Chase of Chaseholm Farm in 2013 — a pivotal year for both of them. Chase, a third-generation dairy farmer, had recently taken over Chaseholm’s operations and was beginning a multi year process of transitioning toward more sustainable practices. She stopped feeding grain in 2015 and by 2017, the farm was certified organic and 100% grass-fed.
He walked up to Chase at a Stissing Mountain High School basketball game, where a team sponsored by Chaseholm Farm was playing. “I told her I’d like to do a longer-term project as a way to build my skills — who she is, who her family is, the legacy of the farm she had inherited, and how she wants to transform it.” That conversation launched a years-long project. “I wanted to explore who is farming today.”
Hergt’s interest in farmers dates to his time in Vermont, where he was struck by the gap between public perception and on-the-ground reality. “When most people imagine a Vermont dairy farmer, the image of a Oaxacan Mexican migrant may not be the first to come to mind,” he said. Hergt cited “Silenced Voices,” a 2010 film produced by the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project, as a turning point: “These farmers were keeping Vermont dairy alive. That really informed me, helped me create a set of priorities about what kinds of stories I want to tell.”
Rock Steady Farm
In 2020, during the pandemic, Hergt began documenting Rock Steady Farm, a nonprofit, 12-acre produce farm in Millerton. The farm describes itself as “a queer and trans led multiracial worker cooperative” that works to “catalyze structural and political change in the food system.” Hergt had met the founders in 2015, soon after they launched.
“I felt lucky that I’ve known them since the beginning,” he said. “It’s allowed me to expand this terrain of who’s farming. It became a nice sort of mutual getting to know each other, becoming friends and finding ways to collaborate in the work.”
One result of that collaboration is “Rock Steady Farm,” a 20-minute documentary funded by HUDSY, a nonprofit supporting Hudson Valley filmmaking. The film, completed in 2022, is available through HUDSY’s website and Rock Steady Farm directly. Since then, Hergt has continued working with the farm to document trainings and events through photo and video. “We maintain a close relationship,” he said.
Sky High Farm
In 2024, Hergt was hired by the Foundation for Community Health to document grantees, a project that introduced him to Sky High Farm in Ancramdale. The nonprofit grows organic produce and raises livestock to donate to organizations fighting food and nutrition insecurity. Its broader mission includes supporting food sovereignty and food justice efforts in the United States and abroad.
Sky High is currently in the process of restoring a 550-acre farm using regenerative agriculture principles, including planting cover crops to establish native pastures for cattle. “We’re monitoring the birds and wildlife as they come back,” said Josh Bardfield, the farm’s co-executive director. “And we’re documenting that with data and images. Walter Hergt is helping us visually document these changes.”
The two are continuing to explore new ways of collaboration. Hergt’s photos, videos, and oral history work are helping Sky High communicate the scale and ambition of its evolving efforts.
A Long View
“The beauty of long-term documentation is that you deeply lean into a place and explore it — the land, the landscape, the history, the relationships that have come before and that are nurturing it now,” Hergt said. As someone trained in ecology, he said he’s “always drawn toward edges, edges of fields, of field and wood, edges where old fence lines used to be. These are places of extreme dynamism in a landscape. When we bring the relationships that are stewarding the land at this time, we can also start to look into the future.”
Hergt is acutely aware that farms like those he documents face existential challenges: “These people that we’re talking about are creating new models, attempting to make this sustainable, and economically sustainable, in a very difficult place for family-owned farms. When you go to a farm stand or a farmers’ market, you are directly or indirectly supporting those possibilities.”
In 2022, Hergt earned a certificate from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. With hundreds of images and hours of video and audio material from his time with Chaseholm, he hopes to eventually publish a book that chronicles “the first phase of the third generation of Chaseholm Farm.”
For now, he remains committed to documenting the everyday labors of farming.
“When their hands are in the soil, as they sweat and bend, with discomfort but also care and intention, I’m always moved to be in that presence,” Hergt said. “I take it as a real privilege to be allowed to make images.”