Having a Field Day at Happy Jack’s
story by Donna Hecker and photography by Talitha Schroeder
Hundreds of farm folk and city folk got together recently for Frankfort, Ky.’s 64th Annual Farm/City Field Day, a tradition started back in 1958 by the late Paul Gray, Franklin County’s legendary agriculture extension agent.
There was a lot of birdsong and insect buzz in the air at Happy Jack’s Pumpkin Farm, owned and operated by Richard and Lee Ann Jones and their sons David and Adam, whose own children are already getting their hands and feet dirty.
David told of how the last time Happy Jack’s hosted Field Day, it was 1996 and his parents were just starting to diversify their farm under Kentucky’s tobacco settlement program.
They decided to test produce and pumpkins. And the agritourism business was building up at the time. They had a half acre of produce then; now we've worked up to about six acres of produce plus six acres of sweet corn grown every year, and 15 acres of pumpkins for the fall season. Today our main business is selling directly at farmers markets and to some of the local restaurants, especially Ouita Michel’s. She’s a big supporter. So a lot of our focus now is on summertime crops.
When Paul Gray was Franklin County’s extension agent, tobacco was king in Kentucky and a good part of Field Day centered on its cultivation, according to Philip Case, former editor of The Frankfort State Journal.
Landowners (ranging) from those who devoted acres to raising, harvesting and marketing tobacco to ones who had a small allotment, raised a “crop.” Proceeds paid for most everything on the farm from the land itself to kids’ college tuition.
Until the early 2000s, the federal government underwrote tobacco’s success, guaranteeing a certain amount for every pound. Then “price support” as it was called (although the program was actually self-supporting) ended, and tobacco hit the free market.
Without that guarantee, most farmers stopped raising tobacco, a labor intensive crop from beginning to end. Perhaps more so than any other crop, tobacco called for farmers to invest a lot to get it to market before they ever received their first check in late fall or early winter.
Farmers couldn’t afford to take the risk, particularly with rising costs and a shrinking labor pool. In 1982 there were 640 farmers who raised tobacco in Franklin County. Today there is one.
Philip’s comments underscore tobacco’s value to Kentucky farm families like the Joneses, and help us appreciate how Kentucky’s tobacco settlement fund and subsequent diversification efforts were so crucial to shaping today’s agricultural landscape on farms like Happy Jack’s.
Adam and David are the fifth generation of their family to farm Happy Jack’s 200 or so acres, much of it held within the embrace of the south fork of Elkhorn Creek. Their mother Lee Ann was instrumental in establishing Frankfort’s present-day farmers market, which now includes more than 50 vendors, and generated over $600,000 in sales in 2023. Farmers markets have proliferated across Kentucky over the last 25 years as farmers expanded into fruit and vegetable production, and the value-added goods that could be made from them.
The Field Day visitors who toured Happy Jacks on tractor-pulled flat-bed trailers learned there’s more to farming than growing produce. Lee Moser from the University of Kentucky was on hand to talk about farming and ecology.
It's really important to Richard and his family so he gave me the grand tour and showed me all the different things they're doing to protect soil and water quality. He took me down to Elkhorn Creek, which they utilize to supplement the 48 to 50 inches of rainfall we get every year in central Kentucky.
They’ve set aside riparian buffers – trees, shrubs, and grasses – by the creek to anchor it in place. And they're not using that area all the time because they know it floods, so that’s where they withdraw water.
It's all part of their thinking about how to be stewards of their soil and water, and how to protect water quality as it leaves here.
Anything that comes off the farm goes down the Elkhorn Creek to whomever might receive it next. It will eventually make its way down to the Gulf of Mexico and potentially impact folks who use that area for a livelihood as fishermen.
When I visited with Richard, I saw one of his grandkids running through the woods. That's hard to beat when you're thinking about an opportunity for kids to grow up in.
A nice creek, a place where you can spend time with your family, or out running around the woods. Where wildlife abounds, if you're a hunter; or if you like to bird watch, having all these varieties of trees – the diverse landscape here is a boon for all their goals.
A couple of stops after Lee’s talk and we were almost to the high point of the day – ribeyes, hamburgers and hot dogs – served with side dishes prepared with fresh vegetables from the fields at Happy Jack’s, and the first Field Day lunch in which everything but the meat was sourced on-site.
But first we heard from Holly Hill Events Chef Scott Darnell. Scott’s wife Teresa is not only our Events Director; she also happens to be Lee Ann Jones’s younger sister. Chef Scott spoke for all our Holly Hill family as he rhapsodized about the difference that local ingredients make.
All of our menus are crafted around the wonderful produce coming from this farm and others. It's such an unbelievable treat to have access to it. It makes our job easy because the food tastes so wonderful right out of the ground.
Sometimes you have to make adjustments. You can't always get lettuce. Sometimes it gets super hot, and the lettuce gets dry and bitter to use. So you've got to adjust and use something else that’s seasonal.
As a chef, it's easy to get on our supplier’s website and say, I want this local and I want this regional. This is coming from northern Tennessee. This is from Ohio. But the difference with what we do in Ouita’s restaurants is the connection you develop. You become friends with your farmers.
You're giving your money to your friends and not some big corporation. So anytime you guys can use local produce, please do. It'll pay off.
Scott’s right. The real pay-off is in the relationships we’ve built with our farmers. We know them by their first names, we know their children, we’ve shared stories and meals, celebrated the good times and commiserated during the bad ones.
And if Farm/City Field Days can bring even more city folk and country folk together to form these same kinds of relationships, we’re all in. It may be the beginning of a beautiful (and delicious) friendship.
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Pepper Jelly & Cream Cheese
Holly Hill Culinary Director and Executive Chef Tyler shared this pepper jelly recipe with us, along with the story of how his Nan always set out an appetizer spread on crystal plates for her family. Pick a pepper or two from your local farmers market and create your own party spread.
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