How You Gonna Keep ’Em . . .

We’ve all heard the sad story about family farms: the kids just don’t want to take over the family business, so they go off to college and then move to the city to find jobs. The parents have no choice but to sell the land — sometimes land that’s been in the family for generations — to developers or agribusinesses.

Well, this alumna’s story doesn’t quite fit that national pattern. Many things about Jeanne Bakeman Jackson ’69 don’t fit a pattern. She grew up on a farm in Tioga County, just 15 miles from Ithaca College. She went to Broome Community College for two years and then, already married with a young family, she attended IC as a commuter student on a full scholarship, majoring in physical education.

Jackson remembers her time as a student at IC fondly, but, she recalls, it wasn’t easy being a commuter student. "I didn’t have much in common with the students who lived on campus. I had more responsibilities," she says. Nevertheless, she persevered. After receiving her degree, she and her husband, Edward "Skip" Jackson, moved to Indianapolis, where he had a good job with Borden and she taught in an inner-city school. But there was something wrong.

"We’d gone to college and felt we could do something different. But we really wanted to raise our kids on a farm, the way we’d grown up," says Jackson. So they moved back to Candor, bought a farm, and went to work — hard.

Iron Kettle Farm began as a small roadside farm — selling strawberries, corn, summer vegetables, tomatoes, and some fall produce from an abandoned corncrib. The first year they did pretty well. In the fall Jackson used her artistic talents to create a pumpkin display with about a dozen characters from children’s books. It was a big hit with their local customers. The Jacksons decided not only to continue the practice, but to expand on it at pumpkin-harvest time in future years; it would, they hoped, draw in people from a wider area and introduce them to Iron Kettle for the mainstay summer growing season as well.

In 1973 the Jacksons built their first permanent market building. Business boomed — partly, perhaps, because there was little local competition, but mainly because the Jacksons, and later their kids as well, worked hard all year long to introduce a wider variety of goods and broaden the farm’s roadside appeal, especially to families with children. They scrambled to keep up with the business’s growth, building addition after addition to the original building. A decade later they began growing their own vegetable plants, annuals, and perennials in greenhouses.

Iron Kettle Farm has continued to expand over the years and now draws visitors from all over the Northeast. The farm is such a tourist attraction that it won the Governor’s Agricultural Award at the New York State Fair in 1992 and the first-ever Agriculture-Tourism Award in 1998. Jeanne Jackson’s display of a dozen pumpkin characters has grown into an annual Halloween extravaganza, with a cornfield maze, hayrides, a "Spook Barn," a "Boo Barn," the "Tipsy Tunnel," the "Tricycle Track" — and the famous "spooktacular" display of children’s story characters (from the Three Men in a Tub to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and everything in between). During the public season (May 1 to October 31), thousands of visitors come to admire the gardens, buy plants and produce, browse in the gift store, indulge in homemade "country" foods (cider, homemade doughnuts, pies, and cookies), and visit the baby animals: goats, sheep, ducks, chickens, miniature horses, donkeys, pigs — all those barnyard animals we imagine when we think of family farms.


Down on the farm: Jackson and
her six grandchildren at the family homestead

The three Jackson children — Brian, Bonnie, and Jennifer — grew up working on the farm and in the business. All three went off to college, but all of them, like their parents, were drawn back to the farm after graduating. They are all now partners with Jeanne and Skip in Iron Kettle Farm. Brian and Bonnie, who each have three children of their own, live on the farmstead in homes they built with the help of their parents. The youngest, Jennifer, got married this summer, and she and her husband live in the farm’s newest home, a log cabin.

"I’d always hoped my children and grandchildren would live near Skip and me on the farm," muses Jeanne Bakeman Jackson. Having the grandkids around is her favorite part of farm life. But the life, even with so many family members contributing, isn’t easy. "I probably should have majored in something different," laughs Jackson, "because among other things, I’m the bookkeeper. Luckily I enjoyed math in college." Her teaching background comes in handy in planning activities for her grandchildren and the many children who visit Iron Kettle. Both the best part and the hardest part of life on the farm, she says, are "working very closely with everybody — being a family plus working together." This one farm, she points out, now has to support four families. "My goal has been to have us all live and work together as smoothly as possible, to have a good income to support us all, and to keep everyone on an even keel."

It’s not hard to imagine that someday Jackson’s grandchildren, once they graduate from college and try somewhere different, might also choose to break the national pattern by coming on back home to the farm. Or maybe by then it will be considered "following a trend."