GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — The Arboretum Farm opens to the public this Sunday, Sept. 15.
Visitors will be able to brush up on their food knowledge at a $5.4 million interpretive farm at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. The farm, designed to educate the public about agriculture, will open Sunday, Sept. 15.
The Arboretum has long featured home garden and herb exhibits, maple syrup operations and other edible products. But most of its 1,200 acres are devoted to ornamental plants and trees.
Now the arboretum will cultivate fields of fruit, vegetables and Minnesota crops, including corn, soybeans and wheat.
The farm, to be paid for with private donations, sits on 40 acres, a quarter of which will open this fall. The fields surround a 100-year-old barn, a bright red building with a stone foundation in a pastoral setting.
Through interpretive exhibits and educational programming, arboretum visitors will come away knowing not just what growing food looks like, but also how it smells, feels and tastes. They’ll learn about farming practices in the past, present and future.
Food produced on the farm will be distributed to nonprofit organizations, said Alan Branhagen, the arboretum’s director of operations.
“We’ll have fields showing how food is produced in a commercial setting,” he said. “We want to show how modern production is done.”