Tompkins Weekly, 6-18-25, by Aimée Lehmann
The Soil Factory in Ithaca, NY is a community space at the edge of town where art, science and sustainability come together to create new collaborations, new experiences and new ideas. We celebrate experimental learning while exploring new partnerships, and as artists, students, scientists, farmers, entrepreneurs, and interested community members, we meet to discuss, play, learn, and seek new solutions for the issues of our day.
The Soil Factory includes a warehouse and a meadow where we support several Community Gardens: a Marshy Garden of native plants; a fast-growing, diverse Miyawake Forest; a Food Forest; a Circular Bionutrient Economy Experimental Hay Bale Garden, and we partner with OJI:SDA’ to provide space and volunteers for their garden project to support Indigenous people by cultivating, harvesting and preparing healing teas. Our gardens are all hands-on, working sites where community members help sow, grow and tend a wide variety of plants, learning and sharing knowledge as they go. Inside the warehouse, we sponsor talks, gatherings, workshops and activities that focus on the art/science/sustainability overlap and include topics as broad as cloth and clothing reuse to the tiny world of microsculpting, where folks use lab microscopes to discover tiny living beings and then re-create them in (larger) clay forms. We help scientists learn techniques from artists to expand their ability to ‘think outside the box’ and we encourage artists to share space and time with scientists to inform their work. We ask everyone who comes to the Soil Factory to bring an open mind and a sense of play to serious topics so we can dive in—as a community—to discover new pathways and solutions for larger-world questions.
In a recent weeks, the offerings on hand at the Soil Factory have ranged from Alternative Darkroom sessions using vintage developing techniques, to Meditation in the Gardens, to visiting artists sharing their creations in clay-making and ceramics. In the coming weeks we’ll have a meeting of the Foraging Club, a talk on Excretory Justice, and we’ll continue planting in our human-fertilized hay bales. There will be a workshop on a special photographic process that reuses photographic paper while utilizing the sun and our next Soil Factory Artist in Resident will arrive to share her work about Kodak and the Genesee River.
We always say that if you ask ten people what the Soil Factory is all about, you’ll get ten different answers. But at the heart of everything we do is art, science, sustainability—and community.
As we enter our fifth year in existence, the Soil Factory is dealing with both the challenges of growth and the changes in the larger world that have reduced public and government funding for science and the arts. This year, we started a public outreach campaign to increase the number of our sustaining members so the Soil Factory can continue to bring its programs to our community—without charging admission—and have the autonomy to allow our community of artists, scientists and the participating public to experiment with topics they’re interested in without regard to the external forces of funding.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Soil Factory, our 4th birthday party is happening during our Summer Solstice Festival, from Tuesday June 17th-Sunday June 22 with a wide array of events and programming. Check out the entire list of events at https://thesoilfactory.org/projects/summer-solstice/
To find out more about the Soil Factory, please go to https://thesoilfactory.org/ or reach out to soilfactoryevents@gmail.com and ask to be added to our weekly newsletter.
Hope to see you around the Soil Factory!
Aimée Lehmann is a freelance writer and board member of WEAVE Community, the 501c3 organization which runs The Soil Factory in Ithaca. With a career that started as a school teacher and public health professional, Aimée continues to be interested in connecting education with community building.
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