Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Andrew at White Pine Berry Farm. Good morning, Andrew. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So tell me about what part you play in White Pine Berry Farm and... 00:28 the story of White Pine Berry Farm. Great. I'll kind of start at the beginning. My dad was a dairy farmer for his whole life. Opportunity presented itself that some other family, my uncle, my cousins would continue the dairy farmer. And my dad went from dairy to berry and started a you pick berry and egg tourism farm from just a neighbor's, you know, kind of hobby bee farm. And. 00:56 I just was helping out a little bit the first couple of years, helping out the first couple of years just on the weekends and getting it going. And he ran it for seven years. And then in 2019, I came back as the manager and dad took a different full-time job, but it was still helping me a lot on the weekends. And I ran it for the last five years. And then this year we've been running it together as he retired from the... 01:27 the job that he took as a farm director at a local university. That is so fun. Was it his dream that you guys would end up working together? Not necessarily. It seemed like it worked out that way. It worked out that way. It was something that we talked about when he was looking at what we want to do if he ever wanted a farm. 01:54 This intrigued me a lot compared to just dairy farming. If you always look at different farms, I think this is both really good fit for our personalities. We enjoy working with people. It's having guests and public out to the farm. Yeah. 02:10 Okay. Is your dad Greg? Is that his name? Yes, Greg Farmer Greg. Okay. Yeah. Farmer Greg. I was looking at your Facebook page today because I have been crazy busy and hadn't actually looked at it since I booked the interview with you. And I was like, it looks like such a fun place to be. And your Facebook page is brilliant. I don't know who handles, who handles that, but whoever does it is doing a great job. 02:38 Well, thank you. It's something we've always enjoyed. My wife and I have done it for many years. The last couple of years we have joined with. So thanks for the comment on our Facebook page. My wife and I had been running the Facebook together for many years. And then we also have hired an intern the last four or five years to give us a hand with it, especially on the video editing side. But it takes a whole bunch of us to come up with some fun, creative ideas and put them together. Yeah. 03:08 looks super fun and the the way the videos and photos are taken it's very colorful and inviting and that's what you want for people to want to come see you. Yep and we like to think that our Facebook reflects our farm when you come out here you're out here to have experience it's not just about us growing you know fruit and vegetables and pumpkins it's about having a good time on the farm. 03:35 making memories with your family and friends. And yeah, I just want to be a place that is really welcoming and just something that people look forward to. And we reflect that on our Facebook and our website as well. Yes, I was just going to say your website is crazy full. Yeah, it's really hard to describe what we do just in one page because we, like you were saying, it's all summer and fall long. 04:02 We start out with strawberries usually mid-June. Follow that up with strawberries at the beginning of July. Then raspberries, blueberries, and currants come into play. Throughout those times we also have strawberry shortcake days where we have shortcake we sell out of our store and food and wagon rides. On Saturdays we typically do those. 04:26 In July, we have the ElocoCoop Farm Tour. We're a part of where other farms and us, we are kind of used to open our doors. We open our doors, have people from all over Western Wisconsin and the Twin Cities area come out and check out what we got going on. Moving into August, we saw some blueberries that we do our sunflowers and zinnias. In the fall, we do a corn maze pumpkin patch. 04:49 Sometimes we sell some flowers depending when the frost comes, fall raspberry pickin', we even have golden fall raspberries, guided wagon rides on the weekends. We had at least six to seven hundred kids come for field trips this year and always a blast. On top of that we planted Christmas trees which are still a ways out and we host a handful of weddings here as well in our wedding barn. 05:18 And those ...
