Feb 10, 2009

This Farm Market Thrives on It

Completely surrounded by houses, apartments, a college and a state highway, Robinette’s Apple Haus & Gift Barn has no room to expand at its current location.

Not that Ed Robinette is complaining about it. The president of the family-owned business said living near an expanding metropolitan area – greater Grand Rapids in Michigan – has its challenges, but also has benefits. There are more customers around, for one thing.

“The city has come our way over the years, but we haven’t been too negatively affected by growth,” he said. “We have good relations with our neighbors.”

It helps that the Robinettes are careful about noise and other farm activities – especially spraying.

“We can’t drift on anyone,” Ed said. “We have to be more careful than the average grower. There’s little room for error.”

Developers were nosing around other nearby properties a few years ago, but Michigan’s poor economy has brought local growth to a screeching halt. Ed doesn’t expect any further development for quite some time.

“I guess that’s a good way to preserve farmland,” he said.

The Robinette family has farmed in the same area for almost a century, ever since Ed’s great-grandfather moved there from Ohio in 1911. Ed is the titular head of the farm and related businesses, but everybody in the family has an equal say when it comes to making decisions: his parents, Jim and Mary Bethel, brother Bill (the winemaker), younger brother John (cider maker), his wife Alicia (office, winery and gift shop manager), John’s wife Karey (bakery manager) and Ed’s two teenage sons.

The Robinettes own 125 acres, roughly half of that suitable for growing fruit. There are almost 30 acres of apple trees, 6 acres of sweet cherries and 4 acres of peaches. All the fruit is sold retail – the farm’s focus since 1971, when it started moving away from the wholesale market.

The move toward retail has paid off. After years of continuous experimenting, Robinette’s has found quite a few ways to keep its customers occupied. There’s the farm market, of course, and cider mill, bakery, lunch counter, gift barn, winery, horse-drawn wagon rides, mountain bike trail, cross country skiing – the place is packed every fall. Sometimes people wait in line half an hour to get a donut. They don’t seem to mind, though. Some of them watch the kettle corn being made. It’s a fall thing, Ed said.

The horse-drawn wagon rides are another fall favorite. They’re offered on weekends in September and October. The horses are supplied by Ed’s cousins, who approached the farm with the idea.

Robinette’s has been the beneficiary of other ideas, too. A mountain bike race promoter once asked the family if he could build a bike trail on some of their unused land. The finished trail is almost 5 miles long. The Robinettes maintain the trail and charge $3 per ride. It’s not a major moneymaker, but it’s one more way to bring people to the farm, Ed said.

Up until a few years ago, the Robinettes rented cross-country ski equipment. They stopped doing that after its profitability went down, but they still allow people to ski on their land for free – as long as they bring their own equipment.

Haunted hayrides were another experiment that didn’t work out – though not because they weren’t popular. On the contrary: Their extreme popularity is what did them in. There were enormous crowds, long waits, overflowing parking – it made everyone very nervous. After three years, the Robinettes and the hayride organizers decided the activity had outgrown the farm and mutually agreed to part ways. In order to continue, they would have had to cut down part of the orchard to make room for more parking, and would have needed lights, Ed said.

“That was our taste of the Halloween adventure thing,” he said.

They used to grow pumpkins in fall, too, but deer ate too many of them. They buy them from other farms now. Deer control is their biggest challenge when it comes to growing fruit. Being so close to the city, there’s not much hunting in the area and the deer do a lot of damage in the orchard. For protection, all new apple plantings are surrounded by an electric fence for the first three years, until they are strong enough to withstand deer damage. That seems to work pretty well, Ed said.

For more information, visit www.robinettes.com.