You can find small, local farms of all stripes. No two are alike and they don’t fit into tidy categories. Yet, apart from growing stuff, one thing they’re likely to have in common is that they serve their community.
Recently, I visited Pineapple Hill Orchard, Green Lake’s 3+ acre, family-run, apple-filled marvel. They are a wonderful example of a small-farm gem offering a bounty of benefits to the area.
5 Community benefits from Local FArms
A conversation with Greg Becker, who owns and operates the orchard with his wife Barb, revealed several services they offer to our community. Dig this:
- Escape – we all like to escape from life’s pressures sometimes. And who needs Netflix when you have a local farm. During apple season, the Beckers allow visitors to meander their orchard and gardens that they personally manage everyday. This means a chance to get outside, to move those bodies, and to let the sweet air carry your cares away.
- Smarts – Greg bubbled over with knowledge about apples and how to get the best apples from every branch of over a dozen varieties. I learned things I didn’t know I didn’t know. He believes that answering each visitor’s questions is part of his job and they are renowned for their customer service. This orchard serves as a classroom for adults to pick up new skills and for kids to learn that their beloved apples come from real trees and hardworking people.
- Vicarious living – Orchards, and farms, are often romanticized, as in “I’d love to pluck these apples in the cool, morning mist”. However, our daydreams conveniently leave out the heap of work to get those beautiful apples to harvest time; work that is often done in dripping humidity. Luckily, you get to visit the farm of your dreams for an hour, then leave the labor behind.
- Family traditions – Raise your hand if visiting the apple orchard or cider mill was a fall must-do when you were a kid? For me, besides a gallon or two of unbeatable apple cider, I had to get a caramel apple with the crumbled peanut coating. Maybe some cider donuts. And a jar of apple butter. I digress. In any case, having these small orchards nearby allows us to continue these seasonal traditions with our own kids.
- Treats for all the senses – Pineapple Hill is a meticulously-cared for “eye candy” world, which inhales you upon arrival. You feel refreshed as you enter the welcoming, storybook landscape. You taste apples fresh from the tree, specifically bred to be delicious. You hear honey bees zipping to their pollination stations. You smell coneflowers and apple pie and mentally bottle a bit for the long winter ahead.
PREserve our Local farms
THANK YOU to the Beckers for their decades of providing these fresh fruit and farm experiences, plus so much more to our community.
Join FoxRAP to preserve small farms like Pineapple Hill – to keep them as working farms, to maintain the decades of acquired knowledge and infrastructure, and to open the increasingly sticky door to the next generation so they can continue to offer these respites of health and joy to our communities.
Give us a call or see this recent post, under How You Can Join the Effort, to learn more about how you can support our local family farms.
Foxhead Regenerative Agriculture Project 