The Story of Fresh Cut

Shannon Family Farms began as a niche market livestock farm raising high quality pork, chicken, and beef for local consumers by offering whole and half animal purchases and retail cuts. Many of these sales were made through a local market we operated as a partnership in Crawfordsville. Over the past few years, several changes in our personal and farming lives have altered the course of our farm plans and goals. 

Our children are rapidly growing older and becoming more actively involved in school and hobby activities making the daily demands of livestock care along with the town market hours more challenging. Also, our sources of livestock and processing options were changing in offerings and costs. With these changes combined, the decision was made to change our focus over the course of 2019 to 2021 and transition to utilizing our farm for agritourism and growing amazing, seasonal cut flowers for visitors to enjoy and customers to purchase for pick up or delivery. Therefore, the idea of Fresh Cut by Shannon Family Farms was born and began in 2021. So, how did we go from livestock to cut flowers?!?! 

As with the rest of the country, our family was impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic as it shut down our schools in March of 2020. We moved from school activities and outside lessons filling our calendars each week to nothing except farm and market responsibilities nearly overnight and lasting the remainder of the 2020 school year. To back up a bit, in December 2019, Kelly had chosen to step away from my elementary teaching position and began a different position as a preschool instructor for the same corporation. This move was meant to free up some evening time for our kids’ events, farm responsibilities, and the market in town. With Jonathan working 12 hour shifts with a four on, four off schedule at our local steel mill, I was often overwhelmed working as a mom, wife, teacher, livestock farmer, and store owner. The preschool instructor position allowed for a better life balance with fewer outside of school planning, assessing, and grading responsibilities while still allowing for me to teach and be on the same schedule of our schools and children. 

So, the pandemic shut down hit in March 2019 driving our meat demand through the roof from March to early summer with grocery store shelves stocked sparsely. We (luckily) had all our processing spots for 2020 secured and spent many late nights packing meat orders and the days engaging our kids in e-learning at home while Jonathan continued to work at the steel mill. I became a farmer full time, as preschool did not continue once our schools shut down long term. Our girls and I took care of all the animals, hauling hogs to process, delivering orders around town weekly, and continuing to operate our market in town. I also began to search for things to do with the girls (mostly outside with the pandemic) and stumbled across a flower farm in northern Indiana. My first thought was “how awesome to be able to grow flowers and have people come cut and enjoy them”. After going down a rabbit hole and reading tons of social media posts from various farms doing cut flowers for florists and u-pick, I began searching more locally for similar flower operations. I found a couple and we began our adventures as a family visiting a half a dozen different farms across Indiana. 

I’m pretty sure after the first one I came home and said, “we should do this”. I’ve always dreamed of using our acreage for agritourism in order to educate visitors about growing and farming practices while enjoying a behind the scenes look at how things are grown step by step. Right or wrong, Jonathan said, “okay, go for it”. So began our transition to an agritourism destination for a u-pick flower experience. In the fall of 2020, we laid out rows and began tilling up strips in our second hog pasture to begin flowers in 2021. We also purchased a used greenhouse from a family member to relate to the farm and eventually use it to overwinter some crops as well as extend our seasonal growing capabilities. It has been an immense learning curve from setting up the rows to purchasing a tiller, to laying out row cover and drip irrigation, to planting seeds and transplants, understanding how to manage greenhouse controls, to netting and harvesting, to promoting the u-pick experience to our community and beyond. It has all been brand new to our family and a great opportunity for us all to work together in a variety of ways. 

Somewhere in the very early spring months of 2021 I got the amazing idea to connect my teaching background and the flower growing experience to create “Flower Power Kids’ Hour”. Each Wednesday beginning in June we host a class for kids focusing on a topic related to the flower farm. Space is limited and we have an awesome time learning hands-on about flowers, pollinators, seeds, and plants. Each class finishes with an opportunity for participants to pick flowers to enjoy at home.

In addition to the kids’ classes, we are open weekly for u-pick (Thursday to Sunday) and by appointment on other days. We also hosted multiple home school groups, women’s groups, club/organization meetings, and a couple of presale special interest workshops for floral arranging in pumpkins just as fall began in our inaugural year of operation.

As we embark on our fourth year of growing cut flowers for our customers, we continue to offer kids’ classes, group visits, u-pick hours and appointments, and are adding more specialty offerings (date night, pick n’ paint, etc.) along with photography farm rental sessions. We enjoy having visitors and sharing our farm with others. We hope to become a destination for your family and friends to enjoy time together taking in the beauty of flowers and nature. Hope to see you visit soon and return again and again.