Farm to table doesn’t get more real than coming face to face with a pig or touching some basil while it’s still growing. The Kaw Valley Farm Tour offers these kinds of experiences at local farms from here to Topeka.
Each year, the tour runs during the first weekend in October. For $15 per car, you can explore your choice of approximately 30 different family and community farms over two days.
“The idea is to connect the community with regional agriculture, to inspire people to purchase locally, to educate people about how things are grown and maybe even inspire them in their home gardening,” says Hilary Kass, tour coordinator.
Visiting three to four farms on each day is fairly typical, Kass says, and allows you to spend some time at each one. Although most visitors are local, the tour has drawn people from as far as Minneapolis and Oklahoma City.
“We’ll have families with small children; we’ll have older couples,” Kass says. “I met, last year, a group of four people in their mid-20s who go together as a group. They live in different areas going to college, and they meet and they do the farm tour over both days,” Kass says.
Some of the farms are open to the public throughout the year, but many are not. Each farm is different in terms of what activities there are and what they grow or produce.
“The biggest attractions are hands-on types of things, like you-pick flowers or you-pick pumpkins,” Kass says. “One farm has a hayrack ride that takes you down the road and over to the farm. Others have small animals that you can pet. You can watch where the chickens lay their eggs and walk through the barn.”
The farm tour started through a partnership between Douglas County Extension and The Merc Co-op in Lawrence. Last year, they added three KCK farms.
“We are growing with the concept of farming, which means it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in the country,” Kass says. “You can grow a lot of food, a lot of plants, a lot of animals right in the city.”
At Lone Pine Farms in Lecompton, Kansas, which has operated since the 1860s, a big attraction is a pig named Lady.
“Everyone likes seeing a pig up close,” says Sarah Wulfkuhle, operations manager of Lone Pine Farms. “They don’t realize how big they can be, the texture of their coat, how smart they are.”
For Joeleyn Trahan, owner of eat8flowers in McClouth, Kansas, giving tour visitors a hands-on interactive experience is vital. Last year, she introduced scavenger hunts at her farm.
“The scavenger hunt was like, ‘Taste three different types of basil; find two different types of mint and smell them; touch a straw flower,’” Trahan says. “This really encouraged families to go out there and interact and find things they didn’t notice before.”
Trahan especially loves interacting with families with kids, encouraging them to play with her baby goats and meet the donkeys and chickens.
“I love seeing [them] get some sort of spark of, ‘Oh wow, that’s something new and exciting,’” Trahan says.
To interact in another way, she sells baked goods featuring her produce, such as lime basil shortbread.
Kass encourages tour visitors to bring a cooler for the various farm products they might purchase along the way. Beyond vegetables and fruit, different farms sell items such as bread, jams, jellies and honey. There are usually several wineries on the tour as well.
Nancy Thellman owns Juniper Hill Farm and Table, a pizza restaurant on the grounds of Juniper Hill Farms in Lawrence. Her son, Scott, owns and operates the farm. She says having a personal connection with farmers in the community is important.
“Small family farms add so much to the life of a community,” Thellman says. “They feed us and keep space for people to get reconnected with their food and with the farmers who grow their food. It’s really an important part of a community’s life, and when people don’t appreciate that, those small family farms are lost before you know it. So, I hope folks go away having fallen in love with our farm and the farmers who grow their food.”
At Juniper Hill, the farmers pull out various tractors and other vegetable production equipment for people to see on the tour, and they’re available to discuss how they use all of it on the farm. The farm also has a big pumpkin patch, a large greenhouse and picnic tables where people can sit.
“You’re right by the fields, and you’re right by the barn, and you’re right by the pack house where all the vegetables are cleaned and packaged. With one visit, you can see pretty much every part of farm-to-table and [farm-to-grocery store],” says Thellman. “Every part of creating food that you put on your table, you can see from beginning to end.”
Thellman says she enjoys seeing the families who tour Juniper Hills Farm every year. Many families come every year and she has watched their children grow up.
“I really love having time every year where we invite people from all over, where we get to have people—from the city especially—get their feet on some farmland and take some time to learn about the farm and farming and especially food production,” Thellman says.
Gregory Shipe, who co-owns Davenport Winery in Eudora, Kansas, with his wife, says the tour lets people know they’re around and leads to repeat visitors.
Shipe encourages people to come for the tour because “a lot of times during the week, we can’t show them everything because we’re busy tasting wine and selling wine.”
The Kaw Valley Farm Tour will be Oct. 3–4 this year. Information on this year’s tickets and farms will be available at kawvalleyfarmtour.com later in the summer.
