- Kyle Zenz: It's been in our family since 1906.
It was my great-grandfather's farm.
So my grandfather grew up here on the farm,
my dad grew up on the farm, and I grew up on the farm.
Old Oak Family Farm is a 280 acre diversified family farm.
We probably grow at least 50 to 60 different varieties
of vegetables and different fruits.
I typically kind of manage
more of the vegetable side of the farm.
My dad works a lot with the cattle
and working on more of the row crops.
[cows mooing]
Our cattle are completely grass-fed.
We grow oats as a cover crop, and we also grow alfalfa.
And so the oats and the alfalfa serve to be food
for our cattle in the winter.
We sell our produce and our meat that we have on our farm
in a lot of different ways.
Some of it's just word of mouth.
We also have a CSA program, Community Supported Agriculture,
in which people subscribe to our farm and get a box of produce
for 20 weeks during the growing season.
Basically, we're their farmer for the summer.
We're growing their food that they eat.
It's a great model not only, I think, for customers,
but as a farmer, it's nice to be able to know what kind of sales
we're gonna have at the beginning of the growing season.
And that's part of the CSA model,
is where our customers pay us up front for the year,
and in turn we're able to buy our seeds.
We grow some of our seeds in a greenhouse.
We start them early.
And they grow into what we call transplants.
We start planting kind of based on how the season's looking.
We're pretty sensitive
to that traditional last frost-free date in Wisconsin.
This year was an early, really warm spring,
so we were able to get in an early batch of potatoes,
an early batch of radishes and peas.
We harvest basically until things are completely frozen.
This last year,
I was actually harvesting spinach and lettuce
on December 4.
So that's the latest that we've ever still been able
to harvest things out of our garden.
We have a lot of different pests at different times of year
that we deal with.
We try to rotate our crops so that we don't have
as many pest problems.
Flea beetles are a major problem in early spring.
Cucumber beetles are another issue that we have.
The Colorado potato beetle
is a pest that everybody deals with to some extent.
They can be a major problem for your potato crop,
and they completely can defoliate the leaves
of the potato, which causes a lot of stress
to the potato plant itself and can even kill it.
Typically the way we get rid of those is just to smush them.
And that can be a joy in itself,
because they have yellow insides,
and they squirt everywhere. [laughing]
I think raising a child on a farm is a really neat thing,
because they learn that food comes from the farm.
You know, Owen understands that raspberries come
from the bushes in the field, and broccoli grows above ground.
He understands carrots grow below ground.
And for me it's really important for my son to understand
where his food comes from.
You know, it's all about the big picture ecosystem.
You know, I'm keeping our farm healthy by being organic.
I'm keeping our land healthy.
But I'm also helping keep people healthy.
[gentle music]