The body of work produced since the Santanta portrait in 1980 includes several portraits, followed by still lives, and pictorial landscapes which, in the artists view, became less dependent on subject matter and more relevant as a platform for discussing mankind and agriculture's evolving dangerous relationship to the earth.

Environmental activist Wes Jackson from the Kansas Land Institute in Salina, embraced Herd's work as a tool exemplifying his call for a new sustainable approach to agriculture and consumerism. Jackson observed that the power of Herd's work stems from the fact that it draws on people from diverse disciplines to create a tool for change.

"I left art school with a fascination for non-representational work but realized that I could find no place for it in my earthworks. Viewing the Earth from airplanes made it clear to me that abstract imagery is a natural byproduct of the processes of farming and mining. I noticed a link to the abstract expressionists and minimalists simply by looking down at the patterns in the plowed fields. This realization made creating abstract earthworks somehow redundant."
Stan Herd , March 1999

"All over the world farmers draw with the plow, harrow, and harvesting combine, and paint with the colors of their crops... some of these (fields) rival the mystery of prehistoric ground drawings; others conjure up the tumultuous abstractions of modern canvases."

"Stan Herd's clover field still life is art for art's sake."
Georg Gerster, Amber Waves of Grain, 1990