At Pennsylvania Farm Show, 1,000-pound butter sculpture celebrates state’s dairy farmers

Conshohocken artists Jim Victor and Marie Pelton have spent their careers traveling the country as food sculptors, transforming bacon, cheese and candy into works for television shows, state and county fairs, and companies. 

The husband-and-wife duo crafted a Mount Rushmore replica from caramels and turned National Football League draft picks into sandwich sculptures. Four hundred pounds of butter became a mini version of the White House in their hands. Victor was once commissioned to create chocolate portraits of actors Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller. 

“The ephemeral qualities of food are kind of fascinating; we work with everything from soup to nuts,” Victor said. “We work with it all. We’ve made bacon sculptures. We’ve done things for Chipotle. We’ve done things for Subway. We’ve done all kinds of different sculptures.” 

Now, a 1,000-pound butter sculpture created by the couple is being shown at the 109th annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, which bills itself as the country’s largest indoor agricultural exposition under one roof. 

Displayed in the farm show’s main hall in Harrisburg, the butter sculpture features a life-sized cow standing amidst a farm, city skyline, dairy products, and a methane digester — a renewable energy system that farmers use to turn cow manure into electricity. Titled “From Moo to Marvel: Dairy Cows Power Pennsylvania,” the sculpture is expected to attract about half a million visitors during the eight-day event that concludes Jan. 11. Land O’Lakes in Carlisle donated the thousand pounds of butter, which Victor noted was already unsellable for various reasons, such as having been knocked off factory equipment.

Pelton explained the artwork, which is sponsored by the American Dairy Association North East and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, is meant to be a celebration of the state’s dairy farmers and its agricultural industry in general.

Pennsylvania ranks second in the country in the number of its dairy farms and its total butter and cheese production, according to the state. Wisconsin is first.

There are nearly 5,000 dairy farmers and 470,000 dairy cows in Pennsylvania, and the dairy industry contributes $11.8 billion in economic revenue and supports 47,000 jobs, according to the American Dairy Association North East, a subsidiary of the National Dairy Council.

“This sculpture celebrates the incredible dedication and creativity of farmers who feed our communities and champion sustainability,” Pelton said in a press release. “Creating art that highlights agriculture’s vital role in our lives is truly a labor of love.”

Kacie Hershey, a third-generation dairy farmer who works at her parents’ dairy farm, Ar-Joy Farms in Cochranville in southeast Pennsylvania, attended the Jan. 2 unveiling of the butter sculpture with her son, Wyatt. At Hershey’s farm, 800 cows are milked three times a day, and that milk is then shipped to Land O’Lakes. 

It’s these kinds of stories about the state’s and the nation’s milk supply that Hershey said she loves sharing with the public during the farm show. 

“It gives farmers that chance, it gives those in agriculture that chance to share their story and kind of share a little bit about what they do and what their day looks like in all aspects of farming, and be able to educate the consumers more,” said Hershey, whose grandparents, Arthur and Joyce, started Ar-Joy Farms in 1965.

After the farm show concludes, the butter sculpture will head to Reinford Farms in Juniata County, where it will be converted into renewable energy in the farm’s methane digester.

The sculpture, which took Victor and Pelton 11 days to make, is the 23rd work of art that Victor has done for the Pennsylvania Farm Show. Pelton has worked with her husband on the butter sculptures for the farm show since 2007, which the couple explained allows them to create larger and more intricate pieces.

“I think it’s gotten more popular over the years, and it’s gotten to be a bigger deal over the years in a lot of ways,” Victor said of the farm’s butter sculptures. “And I suspect part of that is the fact that they have gotten bigger, and they have gotten more grandiose in this way, and they’re more impressive.” 

“It’s kind of interesting because butter sculpture has had kind of, I don’t know what you’d call it —” Victor continued, at which Pelton chimed in, “A bad reputation.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t say a bad reputation, but it’s a checkered reputation in the sense that it’s not accepted in all communities as being, like, this is so very important,” Victor said. “You know, it’s probably laughed at in some places.”

There’s this idea that butter sculptures are less real art and more entertainment, Pelton said. But for the artists, both of whom are graduates of the sculpture department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, it’s very real – and important. It is, they said, a way to expose hundreds of thousands of people not only to art but to the state’s agricultural landscape as well.

“Because of our background, Jim and I really do put all of our artistic skills and sensibilities into it,” said Pelton.