Welcome Back, Earthwork

Beloved Lake City family farm is back with new programming, events, and educational opportunities.

By Ren Brabenec | Aug. 1, 2026

We said goodbye to Earthwork Farm’s popular Harvest Gathering festival in 2024, but the farm is back with a new vision and big plans to make the 181-acre farm a center for community building.

Earthwork is a multigenerational family farm founded in 1977 with the intent to engage in regenerative agriculture and serve as a community hub. The farm hosted its annual Harvest Gathering festival from 2001 through 2024, garnering statewide and national attention. Now, owner Seth Bernard tells us the farm is pivoting to focus on more frequent events and programming spread throughout the calendar year.

“With the help of former executive director of Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, Hans Voss, we’re transitioning to a nonprofit organization that centers educational programming, farming workshops, team-building activities, and music and art retreats/residencies,” Bernard says. “We believe this shift will allow us to reach more people and build an even larger community than we had before.”

“I spent 29 years with the Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, 25 of which as executive director,” Voss adds. “Building on that background, now I’m identifying priorities, developing plans, and configuring fundraising, strategic partnerships, organizational management, and financial administration for Earthwork.”

The Farm: Regenerative Agriculture

Touring the farm and understanding all of its operations takes at least a day, ideally a weekend.

To start, Earthwork raises grass-fed cows, as well as pigs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks. The farm has a large greenhouse that has been in continuous operation for about 40 years. There is also a medicinal herb garden and a Three Sisters garden where Indigenous agricultural methods are practiced. Earthwork also has a dedicated pumpkin patch that becomes the highlight of the farm every October.

There are numerous flower beds placed throughout the farm, inviting pollinators. And speaking of pollinators, Earthwork hosts an apiary, also known as a “bee yard,” where honey bee colonies have lived for years.

The farm even has a sugar maple forest with a working maple syrup operation and several walking trails that traverse a variety of ecosystems and habitats, providing opportunities for plant identification and foraging.

“The connection between the health of the soil and the health of human beings can’t be stressed enough,” Bernard says when we asked what regenerative agriculture means to him. “We are connected to soil, ecosystems, and the land, but we often forget we need healthy ecosystems in order to survive as a species, and we have agency when it comes to influencing those ecosystems for the better, or for the worse.”

Bernard also believes that because regenerative agriculture is simply a return to how farming has been done for thousands of years, it connects people to their history, reminding them that commercial agriculture is a recent phenomenon and can deplete soil health and cause a host of other environmental and ecological problems.

To Bernard, the benefits of regenerative agriculture are most evident in the workshops Earthwork hosts.

“You may do a variety of professional endeavors in your lifetime where your passion comes alive, and your purpose ignites,” Bernard says. “Perhaps farming isn’t what you see yourself doing full-time, but we live in a time when things feel impossible and chaotic with the advent of mass-produced technologies and widespread environmental degradation. Learning ancestral agricultural methods in simple, practical ways you can replicate in your own backyard, or even on your porch or in your window planters, gives you agency and makes you multi-talented.”

Bernard continues, “Through regenerative agriculture, you learn creativity and a connection to community and nature, and those things are rapidly becoming lifeboats in our modern age.”

The Programming: Youth Education

One of the biggest focuses of Earthwork is youth education.

“Young people will inherit the world we give them,” Bernard tells us. “They are the leaders of tomorrow, but how they lead in that tomorrow will be greatly influenced by how we lead them today, and one of our preeminent goals at Earthwork is to set children and teens up for success by helping them develop essential skills.”

Earthwork currently hosts a day camp and farm school for three weeks every summer, with the goal to expand it to an eight-week program over the next five years.

“When kids see the food systems in their entirety, from seedling to table, they learn how they can get food for themselves and their communities,” Bernard adds. “Our goal is to lead the region in competency-based learning, and there’s no better way to do that than by passing on the skills of regenerative agriculture.”

According to Bernard, everything about the farm’s youth programming centers on connecting children to talented professionals and mentors. From botanists to chefs, musicians, artists, writers, poets, biologists, nutritionists, foragers, apiologists (honey bee experts), and maple syrup makers, Earthwork centers its vision on knowledge-sharing and helping people of all ages learn how to better care for themselves and others.

Bernard also tells us that none of this would be possible without Earthwork’s long-standing relationship with Lake City Area Schools.

“Superintendent Dr. Timothy Hejnal and other teachers have come to Earthwork to give seminars and workshops for Farm School,” Bernard said. “We collaborate on a ‘passion meets purpose’ model where we help young people find an activity or activities on the farm that they’re passionate about, and then we teach them the practical applications of that activity, skill, or trade so they can find purpose in it.”

The Next Adventure: The Barn

Another major project Earthwork is actively engaged in is a complete renovation of the farm’s barn.

“We want the space to be something we can use year-round, so we’re building a community hall in the barn,” Bernard says. “It’ll be a place where we can host day camps and after-school programming in the fall, winter, and spring, rather than farm camp just being a summer activity.”

Both Bernard and Voss emphasize community-building as the central focus of Earthwork. Bernard closed our conservation by sharing a few lines from one of his songs.

“We’re gonna need each other more than ever moving on / we’ve got to love our neighbor more than we need to prove them wrong,” he says.

Upcoming Events

Earthwork Farm School. July 27-30, August 4-7, and 11-14. Featuring Recording Studio and Beatlab, Instrument Petting Zoo, Singing, Songwriting, Drawing and Illustration, Nature Journaling, Poetry, Creative Writing, Cooking, Nutrition, Gardening, Foraging, and Botany Walks.

Youth Camp Fundraiser. October 4. Featuring Grammy-winning Michigan legend, Harmonica virtuoso Peter Madcat Ruth, and renowned cellist Jordan Hamilton.

Rock Concert to Benefit the School of Rock. (October date TBD)

Men’s Retreat. November 6-8. Featuring an opportunity to step out of the bustle of our lives, slow down, hold space, and connect.

Visit earthworkfarm.com for event times, directions, and updated programming.

Photo: Michigan artist Molly performs on the Cedar stage at Earthwork Harvest Gathering. Photo credit: Vincent Brady