In my daily reading and wandering, I like to follow at least a few threads related to slow food and local food systems, as there seem to be so many productive connections between healthy local food systems and healthy local arts systems. Today I stumbled onto a practice in New Zealand farming that seemed rich with promise (if not practical application).
Sharemilking is an agreement between a young dairy farmer and an established dairy farmer moving toward retirement. Says the article overview:
In a sharemilking agreement, a young farmer operates a farm on behalf of the farm owner for an agreed share of farm income and expenses. The arrangement offers young farmers a way to build assets and dairy management skills without requiring a large amount of capital input at the beginning of their careers.
Since dairy farms are both capital intensive and work intensive, sharemilking offers a transition of both work and capital over an extended period, and also fosters knowledge and skill sharing across generations of farmers.
I honestly have no idea how this might connect, in a practical way, to arts and cultural endeavor. But I have an image of an aging and established theater company in a community slowly decreasing their own use of their space to allow an upstart group to use it more frequently. Each would transfer knowledge and energy to the other, and the large capital requirements of professional-grade theater would be made available to some fresh new voices while they got their organizational legs under them.
The article has some wonderful context about how the sharemilking model is evolving with the shifts in costs and operating dynamics of dairy farms. I’m even less sure how this relates to arts and culture, except that it’s cool to know that there’s a ”cows-for-land equation,” and that it’s shifting over time in rather dramatic ways.
Moo.
We talked about similar ideas over at 2amtheatre.com, using the rallying cry “never be dark.”
Our thought is, it wouldn’t necessarily be about an aging company decreasing its use of space in order to transfer the space to someone else–although it could.
But a company with its own building, with multiple performance spaces that go unused over the course of a season, could and should open those spaces up as rent-free as possible to nurture smaller companies, both local and touring groups, so as to “never be dark.”
Ideally, this brings in new and varied audiences who already know the smaller companies as well as exposes them to the larger company’s audience. Best of all, it keeps the one venue busy with a wider variety of events in a given month, giving patrons more reasons to go there more frequently.
(I have heard some larger theatres say, “Yes, we’ve got something going almost every night during the season.” Yes, but that’s two different productions running at the same time. If a patron’s seen them both, they don’t have any reason to come back to your building again for another 5-6 weeks.)
So I love this example. We’re going to keep elaborating on the “never be dark” theme over at 2amt…
Thanks David,
I would agree that being generous with space is a great practice. But it lacks the overlapping direct incentives of a ‘sharemilking’ arrangement. Often, the theater company controlling the space has a lot to lose by sharing that space at no or low cost, and only vague and altruistic gains. In sharemilking, the dairy owner is seeking an exit strategy, and may have increasing health concerns that make it impossible for him/her to actually work the farm. And the young farmer has every incentive to maximize farm productivity.
How could we create material or direct benefit to the theater that controls the space to encourage best use of the resource while acknowledging that everyone in the mix is short on money, time, and energy?
I’ve long thought about the prospects of sharing in the dance community, in terms of resources, space and even dancers…but that would involve actually sharing, which I don’t think more experienced/larger artist-driven companies are necessarily willing to do. I’d love to be proven wrong!
I love this connection and want to pose a question. Would it be possible to see this relationship begin to exist in the arts community via human relationships? I wonder how we can take existing circumstances surrounding internships and mentorships and elevate them to become mutually beneficial learning opportunities that encourage transition and change amongst arts leadership? Thanks for writing about this.
This is very common in the mining exploration business where it is is called “farm in” for obvious reasons.