Area crop artist’s latest work celebrates U.S.-Mexico ties

Kansas soil, cleared of vegetation to reveal a rich brownish mauve, forms the indigenous woman’s skin.

Sand, mulch, woodchips, and compost are layered and sculpted to form the rest of the portrait titled “Young Woman of Mexico.”

Stan Herd has sculpted similar images for more than 30 years in places like Brazil, China, and Cuba. His earthworks are giant installations best seen from above.

Young Woman of Mexico, which he is carefully tending on land in Linwood, Kansas, has quickly become a favorite. Linwood is about 30 miles west of Kansas City near DeSoto.

“I’ve never done anything that feels more relevant to the time right now,” Herd said. 

Herd has long geared his art to social change. Here, he is hopeful it can bolster connections during this stressful time for U.S. agriculture and binational relations between the U.S. and Mexico.

Indeed, Mexican consuls in Kansas City and Brownsville, Texas, have provided input for the one-acre artwork, ensuring that her brow, lip, and nose accurately portray an indigenous woman from Mexico.

The Mexican consul in Brownsville, Judith Arrieta Munguia, has invited Herd to sculpt up to four more images of indigenous women along Mexico’s side of the southern border.

Munguia suggested that those images could mirror an emblem of four indigenous women introduced to Mexico by President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Sheinbaum is Mexico’s first female president. She named 2025 the Year of the Indigenous Woman.

Tensions between the countries continue over President Donald Trump’s efforts to significantly increase deportations, a plan that is deeply impacting Mexican immigrants and Latino communities in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the Mexican president staved off threatened tariffs by Trump.

But cuts to global food aid and rising input costs continue to deeply impact the U.S. farm economy.

“I can vote, but there is so much that I can’t control,” said Mark Milleret, who owns the field where the image is sculpted, along with his wife, Melinda.

Mexico, Milleret points out, is the leading importer of U.S. yellow corn, as demand from China has slowed in recent years.

“Right now, we’ve got depressed corn prices,” Milleret said. “And we’ve got a depressed relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.”

Other longtime farmers agreed.

Patrick D. Ross, of Lawrence, noted the impact on North American soybean farmers as China seeks cheaper markets in South America.

He was among several landowners who attended a recent event at the field where Herd created the image.

The Consul of Mexico in Kansas City, Soileh Padilla Mayer, ceremoniously laid a stone in the earthwork, part of the eye of Herd’s image.

Previously, Padilla Mayer was Chief of Staff of the Director of Mexico´s Institute of Fine Arts.

Padilla Mayer said that Herd’s image honors not only Mexico’s female president, but all the indigenous women of Mexico.

“In spite of all the narratives that might be going on, we’re still neighbors, we’re still friends, we’re still family,” Padilla Mayer said. “We’re trying every single day to make this region very prosperous.”

Herd stresses that he wants the image to draw widespread support, acknowledging the many GOP-leaning voters of Kansas.

Herd was born in Protection, Kansas, in Comanche County. He now lives in Lawrence.

“These are farmers,” Herd said. “I never have asked them to do a political piece on the grounds, out of a respect for them, for farm folks in general, and their neighbors.”

U.S. Ag Economic Overview

Challenges facing agriculture were on full display in Kansas City during the 11th Annual Ag Outlook Forum last month.

Seth Meyer, chief economist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave a talk with a title that sums up concerns: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: U.S. Ag Economic Overview.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the government will buy 417,000 metric tons of U.S. commodities, the equivalent of 16 million bushels of corn and sorghum, for export as part of international food aid programs, according to reporting by The Kansas Reflector.

Earlier in the year, the administration faced criticism for threatening the international aid program Food for Peace, which benefited Midwestern agriculture.

The program had long been managed under the U.S. Agency for International Development, which folded under Elon Musk’s efforts to trim the national debt.

Food for Peace was initiated under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was raised in Abilene, Kansas.

But other challenges also face farming.

According to the Department of Agriculture, input costs of farming: feed, fertilizer, fuel, and equipment have increased drastically since 2020.

“…Seed expenses have increased 18%, fuel and oil expenses increased 32%, fertilizer expenses increased 37%, and interest expenses increased by a whopping 73%,” according to the Department of Agriculture.

Labor costs are another factor, up 47% since 2020.

The Trump administration blames that partly on policies of the Biden administration.

It also cites difficulties and high costs of using the H2-A visa, a program for temporary agricultural workers.

Milleret and Ross track all of the developments through patience honed by experience.

Both men remember dire periods for farming.

Ross cites the Soviet grain embargo of 1980 under President Jimmy Carter, intended to punish the former Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan.

The embargo caused prices for wheat and corn to plummet until President Ronald Reagan lifted it in 1981.

The farm crisis of the 1980s followed, considered the most financially devastating period in agriculture since the Great Depression. Families lost land that had been held and farmed for generations, banks failed, and business closures decimated main streets of rural communities.

More recently, there have been conflicts over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or USMCA. It replaced the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement. 

In 2020, Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, banned genetically modified corn from the U.S. from entering Mexico.

Corn originated in what is now modern-day Mexico. It was used centuries ago by the Mayan and Aztec peoples.

Mexico is dedicated to protecting native corn varieties from being contaminated through cross-pollination.

The ban was eventually found in conflict with existing trade agreements.

Subsequent efforts began in early 2025 to enshrine bans on planting GM varieties of corn in Mexico into the country’s constitution. 

Trump-Owned Lot Leads to Kansas

 Milleret and Herd have long collaborated on art.

The field that now displays the indigenous woman has hosted multiple commercial earthworks, necessary to fund Herd’s passion projects.

In fact, Herd first approached Milleret in the mid-1990s. 

Herd needed to raise money to complete an image in New York City on land owned by a bombastic businessman: Donald J. Trump.

The struggle to complete it was captured in the film “Earthwork.”

“I want to buy your cornfield,” is how Milleret remembers Herd’s proposition.

Herd rented a portion of it, sculpting a logo of Farmland Industries.

The advertisement was used on a calendar and other merchandising for Farmland, once the largest agricultural cooperative in North America.

“But that got him financially enough to finish the Trump project,” Milleret said.

Through the years, Herd has sculpted other commercial images in the same field, all to support his other, more deeply personal works.

Milleret laughed, noting that his favorite commercial design was of SpongeBob SquarePants for Nickelodeon.

Now that it is harvest season, past the most active growing season, Herd expects Young Woman of Mexico will last through the winter months with minimal upkeep.

The inscription surrounding the earthwork reads: “To Our Neighbors, Our Friends, Our Allies. Viva Mexico.”

The portrait is far less complex than his previous works.

Working a few days a week, Herd finished the Linwood installation in two months.

The “Young Woman of China,” in the Yunnan Province of Southwest China, took 18 months to complete and included marble and granite, rice paddies, and other plantings.

The latest image’s simplicity stems from Herd’s evolving skills, his ability to create subtle shading in the soil.

“The most beautiful part of the whole portrait to me is the woman’s skin,” Herd said of Young Woman of Mexico. “It’s just the earth.”