After much deliberation about the direction and desire of continuing a traditional artistic practice, a young and optimistic Kim Schmidt left an artist apprenticeship in Chicago of 2009 to learn more about "dirt" and the dependency of growing one’s own food. What she thought would be a quick internship to fulfill a long-time itch, turned into a multi-state, 5-year (and ongoing) education of growing organic food for others. From the rolling hills of southern Nebraska to the urban backstreets of Kansas City, MO to the dry, city plots of Denver/Aurora, CO, she learned to grow and nurture hundreds of varieties of vegetables and fruit both in rural and urban settings. Along the way, she has found and met the most surprising of people and flavors the Central United States has to offer. Food, she found, was something everyone could engage in regardless of experience or location. Farming also strangely fulfilled the aspects of creating art she thought she would miss most when leaving a potential career in ceramics.
Growing food became her art practice.
However, when considering where to grow next, she couldn’t quite kick the idea of growing for the community that raised her in Wichita, Kansas. So, in November of 2013, after years of frolicking through everyone else’s backyard farms and gardens, Kim decided to give this farming thing a go in her old stomping grounds, returning to the urban plains of her youth. Scrap Yard Urban Farm was planned and began its earliest stages of production in the fall of 2014, and began its full growing season mid-may 2015, growing a wide-range of organic veggies, fruits, herbs, flowers, and people.