(This article first appeared in the September print edition of the Hendersonian.)
The season for the Henderson Farmers Market at the fairgrounds pavilion is winding down, as it typically does when school starts, but veteran producer Cates Farm Corn Maze & Produce is just getting its second wind.
That’s because the fall season is ripe for strolling through their 12-acre corn maze, selecting the perfect orange orb from the pumpkin patch, riding on a hay wagon and sometimes experiencing a farm for the very first time.
On Fridays, Saturday and Sunday starting Sept. 19 and running through Nov. 2, Cates Farm (located at 8132 Pruitt Agnew Road) will be hosting school groups from Kentucky and Indiana, company parties, church groups and family gatherings.
Hours are Friday from 4-8 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m.-8 p.m. and Sunday from noon-7 p.m. School groups visit on weekdays, and in October a food truck is usually present on Saturday and Sundays.
In addition to the corn maze and pumpkin patch, there’s a straw maze, a giant chess set, cornhole, a jump pad and other games. If the weather is right there’s a bonfire.
Amy Cates and her brother Ab Cates have farming in their blood. The family farm has sold vegetables for 40 years, she said, and next year will be the 20th for the fall corn maze.
“We have to love it in order to keep doing it,” Amy said. “But we’ve come a long way.”
When she says that, she’s thinking about when her late mother, Sharon Cates (for whom the Henderson Farms Market is co-named), retired from school teaching. Sharon thought it would be nice to create a corn maze at the farm, plant pumpkins and have “a couple of school groups out.”
That’s where it started.
“It’s very important to us from an education viewpoint,” she said. “We’re a pretty diverse working farm, and many people have never been to a working farm. We’re giving them something to do to make memories.”
The evolution of their fall activities is a mirror for challenges they’re facing in the other areas of their farm operations.
“I think it’s become more difficult,” she said, looking back on the 13 growing seasons she’s spent producing vegetables. “Every year seems to be more difficult to grow things, in part due to weather.”
Twenty years ago, people were buying six dozen ears of sweet corn at a time to “put up” for the winter. Now many customers just buy six ears at a time, she said.
This year the area had a super wet spring, so things were late getting into the ground, or plants were in the ground and didn’t get any sun for days. Then there was a stretch during the very hot and humid days of July and early August when there was little rain, which made it hard on the sweet corn, the corn maze, pumpkins and tomatoes.
Strawberries and even sweet corn have become challenging. With strawberries, for a few seasons it’s been too wet in their growing season for them to ripen properly. She’s going to give them one more year.
“We used to get 2 ½ months of sweet corn,” she said. “Last year we got 2 ½ weeks. This year we got four (because of late planting).
“People may have noticed that tomatoes weren’t around,” Amy said. Last year they were picking 200-300 pounds of tomatoes each week, and this season it was more like 50. She hopes late tomatoes will come around.
And then there’s sagging population of honey bees, which creates a need to bring in bees to get crops pollinated. She says if that trend keeps up “we’re not going to eat. Many crops need a pollinator.”
In addition to weather and pollination, chemical drift and finding adequate labor are challenges.
“Immigrant workers feed America,” Amy said. “If you’re trying to grow more, labor is a huge issue.”
She said pests have been out of control this year, but they want to stay as non-spray as possible. A new challenge she’s noticed this year is an unusual wildlife population. Deer took out eight rows of lettuce, peppers and cantaloupes.
“Every year is a different challenge,” Amy said.
She offers their produce most days of the week at the Henderson Farmers Market, the courthouse square in Dixon and Beach Bum Farms parking lot in downtown Henderson, and she recently launched a custom-built “mobile market” unit with interior shelving that makes her operation more nimble. She can pull up and start selling without a lot of set-up.
The mobile unit can be taken to food deserts and places they’ve never been before, so it opens up the possibility of new customers who could be glad to have the opportunity. She can visit more than one location in a day (and is looking for places to set up—businesses, industries, church parking lots.)
The “mobile market” also protects her produce from the sun, the heat and the road environment. The sun is particularly hard on the peaches she sells in partnership with Cardinal Farms.
With an open trailer, traveling to Dixon once a week was a bit of a stretch, but the new unit solves that problem.
It’s been a pretty busy season even with the Airline Road overpass reconstruction that shut down one route to the market.
But she said local growers need more help, adding that if people want to be “green” and live more sustainably, they will need to better support local producers.
“We’ve got to have a reason to grow things, and it has to be the local consumer or we can’t grow on a larger scale,” Amy said.
It really makes sense, she said, to buy your vegetables, your fruits, your eggs, your meat locally when possible.
“It’s more nutritious and you get to know the farmer who’s growing it or taking care of the animal,” she said.
Amy says she tries not to get discouraged by the challenges growers face, especially when the weather prevents plants from thriving.
“I try to think about it from a theological standpoint,” she said. “I’m not going to complain about all these plants that are dead. I’m going to say, ‘Thank you, God, for this cucumber.’”
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The Henderson Farmers Market is open for the season from the first of May until the last of October. Recently, the Farmers Market announced that it will be open on Friday and Saturdays till the end of October. Growers and producers set up from 8 a.m. to noon (as long as supplies last). The market includes local and fresh produce, honey, wine, meat, bakery goods and more. The market location is the Cates-Porter Farmers Market Pavilion at Henderson County Fairgrounds located on Sam Ball Way at Airline Road.
Follow the Henderson Farmers Market Facebook page for updates about what’s available at the market and news about special activities that take place on select Saturdays during market season.
