2023 – Bus Tour Stops

There’s a greenhouse for growing flowers for hanging baskets. There are succulents (those odd-looking desert plants that are so easy to care for) there will be pumpkins and squash and watermelons and cantaloupes growing in the fields and 620 tomato plants in the 200×24 foot hoop house. This is a 14-year-old produce farm, full time since 2016, operated by a father and mother and their seven children. In 2008 Freeman was working in the buggy wheel shop across the road when sales of buggy wheels took a bit of a dip, and he decided to try raising some money by farming some of the 48 acres he was using to feed dairy calves. He planted some pumpkins, and sure enough it paid.

The pumpkins are still part of the picture along with squash and watermelons to make up the 30 acres in vine crops that are grown here. The flower greenhouse is used to grow hanging baskets, lots of petunias, geraniums and begonias. It was 2014 when the oldest child, a daughter, was 11 years old that production was ramped up, and in 2016 Freeman became a full time produce farmer. He enjoyed the buggy shop, he says, but the profits from the produce and the chance to work side by side with his family lured him away. It’s nice, he said, to be farming in a way that handily pays the bills and pays off the farm. And the family doesn’t see this occupation in which they all have a very vital part, as being tiresome. Far from it. The children even have their own little garden to grow things to take along to the local produce auction where all the rest of the farm’s crops are sold. All the good stuff goes there, only the number two and three stuff is sold at home, out along the road.

The life of this family, whether planting or harvesting, is not monotonous as they work together in the fields; sharing news, reciting poems, singing together and settling the occasional squabble. Even keeping the weeds at bay with their teams of Belgian horses pulling a cultivator seems a privilege. Freeman likens a day of working in the melon patch loading melons, tossing them from the ground up to the wagon bins, to playing ball all day. Moving, throwing, bending and catching, it tires out the muscles, but at the end of the day there is a good feeling, something good has taken place. Throwing baseballs or throwing melons, it takes a good team to win! Peaceful fields, growing crops, the anticipation of harvest, and a reliable outlet for selling, and most of all a family that works together and has fun together. It can work.

Freeman and Rose Yoder, the owners of Royal Equine, live near the small town of Topeka, Indiana. Freeman grew up a buggy builder’s son. His father passed away when he was 12 years old, and then he spent a lot of time at his grandfather’s farm where his uncle, Devon Bontrager, was taking over the farming. Freeman was fascinated with the eight or more Belgian gelding hitches his uncle was using on the farm. When he was old enough, Freeman started to work in an RV factory, and then in 2006 he bought his first stallion, a Belgian named Country Road Firestone. Eventually the operation increased to eight stallions while he was still working off the farm. Then he quit his factory job to work at home, concentrating on becoming a breeding operation. With expansion came the need of employees which now number three.

Royal Equine stood 23 stallions in 2022. They do take in outside mares, but most of the breeding is done by collecting semen from the stallions and distributing it to mare owners throughout the country. They began as a Belgian breeding business, but now they include standardbreds as well. Freeman’s heart is still with the Belgians which he loves to train and work with in the fields. Expect to see lots of horses on this stop.

Hustle and bustle is what it takes to make things work, whether it’s in some stuffy office, riding in a vehicle to meet customers and potential ones, turning out mobile homes or RVs, or digging in the dirt to grow things. You will see results of hustle and bustle at this stop on the tour. It’s a community effort to market things from small family farms: things like vegetables, meats and eggs. And then there are the niche lines of honey, stone ground flour, tinctures and salves, beeswax candles, and puffed spelt cereal. Everything is from LaGrange or Elkhart counties, and while not organic certified, great care is taken to remain clearly chemical and GMO free.

Farmers Markets, restaurants and retailers are the wholesale customers, and the on-site store provides some retail income, as well as farmers market stands that the company itself runs at the Goshen and Elkhart Farmers Markets. Their top marketing approach is to provide their customers with a very appealing product. Noah Miller, Horn of Plenty’s tomato grower and lead salesperson, will likely be on hand to greet you when you arrive. He and the five person board of directors are more excited than ever with the opportunities that abound for small family farms.

Lunch will be at the Steven Hostetler farm. This is a dairy farm that milks about 85 head of Jersey cows, and markets all of their 100% A2 milk raw directly to customers who have paid what is called a herd share. This means that the customers own a share of the cows and this makes it possible for the farm that has been operating in this way for 23 or 24 years to do it legally in Indiana. There is also a farm store, here and the three boys and two girls in the family all help to make it click. The meal will be served in the old bank barn with its morticed and tenoned timbers, an atmosphere that will surely be pleasing. It will be a haystack meal, probably with hamburger on the bottom and then lettuce, tomato and onion, and then a cheese sauce to go over top. And of couse, no Horse Progress Days tour would be complete without dessert, so count on pie and ice cream to finish off the meal.

About two years ago Harry Stutzman, Leon Miller and Lamar Kuhns, three neighboring dairy farmers, decided to try to do something about the dairy situation. It seems like so much of today’s milk is over-processed and doesn’t taste like it should. So, after much discussion and pencil pushing, with the help of a group of interested investors, they decided to set up a processing plant on the 200 acre 130-150 cow Stutzman farm in the hopes that eventually they will be able to process milk from their community and find markets for it. The milk is pasteurized at the lowest level of high temperature short time possible for longer shelf life and it is not homogenized. It is cream-line milk from Holstein cows milked three times a day.

One of the special features of this unique dairy effort is the flavored milk they offer; chocolate, strawberry, blueberry, peach and a few other flavors. All of the flavoring is natural and sweetened with cane sugar.

And here is some big news! In the 2022 World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin nestled among the names of winners (many of them great big companies) was a first place win for Amish Country Dairy for their cream top whole milk with coffee and maple syrup, and a third place win for their cream top whole milk with salted caramel! The wholesome nature and refreshing quality of the milk is much appreciated by the 125 or so small retail and gas station outlets offering the milk to their customers. The milk can be found locally of course, and also up into Michigan in the area of Detroit and Dearborn Heights. Pains have been taken to obtain all the necessary state and federal licenses and approvals so that customers can be assured of the quality of the milk they drink. Tour participants will probably get to see some of the middle of the day milking, and maybe there will be some samples of the flavored milk to taste!

Stori Enterprises, the 2023 Horse Progress Days featured manufacturer, will be included as a tour stop.