Family Story

 

'Through the Eyes of the Youngest Daughter'

 

 

 

“Casey are you up? Get up! Get up!”  Thats what i would hear before the sun was completely up. Farm living. I was the youngest of four girls so I didn’t have as much of a work load as they did. i could only do so much considering i was only 4 years old. 

 

I came from two very hard working parents. When I say hard work, I don’t mean pulling long hours at the office.  I mean getting down and dirty kind of work from the time the light came up to the time it was time to go to bed.

 

My dad is a 7th generation farmer on the same land all of his fathers before him have farmed.  When he met my mom, a hairdresser city girl, he lured her to farm living.  Thats when everything changed on the farm.  She stirred it up by taking just a simple farm and turning it into a profitable business, called Loppnow Farms.  Even though this took years, sweat and tears, it was more ambition than anyone had ever seen in a city girl.  

 

The Farm  started with raising livestock and having a vegetable store with pick your own vegetables.  We would be out picking vegetables and hoeing in the fields often.  Yes, at the age of 4, I was helping too.  As much as I could.  My two oldest sisters put in the most time because they were at a good ‘helping hand’ age.  We worked together as a family since before I can even remember.

 

My mom decided we needed even more! So she started offering hotdogs and homemade caramel apples in the store during our fall season when we sold pumpkins.  She made us into a well known pumpkin farm at that time.  Hayrides, haunted barn, pick your own pumpkins.  The works.  

 

One day, a neighbor asked my dad if he could grow him some petunias. (A well known basic annual flower/plant.) My dad said, “Im a farmer, I don’t grow flowers.” Lucky for him, my mom overheard this.  My moms wheels started spinning, and for her, she’s thinking of other ways to make everything work financially.  At this time, she wasn’t only the ideas behind the farm.  She was the second most important helping hand on the farm, and she was also working as a cosmetology instructor so we had enough to live on.  This was a time when we didn’t have much of anything, times were harder.  Even though, thats how it was for everyone at that time, because this is before all the thousands of credit cards people use these days to finance a lifestyle.

 

My mom suggested we grow some flowers.  Just a few to sell and put out when we sell vegetables.  She wanted to just give it a try and see if it would even be worth going down a whole new avenue.

 

Something happened that not only changed my parents life, but it had changed mine and my three sisters lives forever!

 

The flowers sold out before the vegetables!

 

Every year we grew more flowers, and less and less vegetables.  Before we knew it, the livestock were packed up and out of there, we had about 10 greenhouses, and we went from being ‘Loppnow Farms’ to ‘Wayne’s Daughters Greenhouses.’

 

Since I was born my mom and dad have built a successful greenhouse business, while running the farm, teaching cosmetology and raising four girls! I have never met anyone like my parents, and seen anyone accomplish the things that they accomplished together.  Now that I’m older, I realize, we all accomplished it together.  Thats why we are all so close to this day.  That’s why my sisters and I, the eighth generation on our family farm, all live right next to each other and right next to my parents.  We don’t know life any other way, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.