July Produce Pioneers

Gene The Pumpkin Man

By Laura Drotleff
Senior Staff Writer

THE Rhodes family farm in Kalamazoo, MI, started out like many in the late 1800s. When Myron Henry Rhodes purchased 40 acres of land a quarter of a mile from where he grew up in May 1885, the house and barn on the land were already there. The house was built in 1882 and the barn was likely built a few years before, says Gene Rhodes, Myron’s grandson and current owner of the farm.

“Back then it was common to build the barn first and live in a shack until there was money to build a house,” he says. “It’s still in good shape and while it’s not conducive to farming in this day and age, it’s an heirloom and it will stay there as long as I do.”

Myron Rhodes was a wooden barrel maker with a wife and six children who would travel by train every winter to South Haven, MI, 25 miles west of the farm. He stayed there Monday morning through Friday evening and return to the farm on the weekends. During the spring, summer, and fall, he would farm the land, raising cattle, hogs, chickens, and sheep, and tilling the land with a team of horses to grow hay, grain, and produce crops.
Gene Rhodes’ father, Ralph, was the fourth child, born in 1895, and worked with his father to grow pickles, muskmelons, cantaloupe, and watermelons. Through the teens and 1920s, they loaded their high wheel wagon with their vegetables and drove to Kalamazoo 9 miles away to peddle their wares.

The Second Generation
Ralph Rhodes picked up odd jobs driving trucks and working on state road M-43, and at age 35 went to work for the state of Michigan at the Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery next door to the farm.

Ralph took over full operation of the farm in 1925 when his father passed away, and he continued to grow pickles and melons. He tilled fields with a single bottom, number 40 Oliver plow with a 12-inch furrow, and a team of two horses, with his son Gene walking in the furrow behind him. Today, the plow is on display at the farm.

“I tell folks that I followed behind the plow a good many miles, and I did,” he says. “The clincher was, my dad was between the plow and me. I loved to walk in a fresh furrow, but I was never stout enough to handle the plow and a team of horses for any length of time.”

Ralph bought a small tractor in 1946 but continued to work with the horses until 1952 when he bought a larger tractor. Today, Gene farms with seven tractors. “I can plow the same field that my father took two full days to plow, in two hours, and it’s a whole lot easier,” Gene laughs.

While diseases and pest problems are similar to what they were in the days when his grandfather and father ran the farm, Gene says controlling them today is incredibly simple, as is harvesting the crops.

“Where my father and grandfather might have taken a ton of produce off an acre, we can easily take 5, 6, or 7 tons off the same acre due to improvements in the seed, practices, and fertilizer,” he says. “The improvement in seed has just blown out of sight in the last 75 years as far as the quality of the seed and the seed that the fruit produces.”

The Pumpkin Man Cometh
Like his father, Gene was a state employee for 30 years, working for 27 years in Kalamazoo at the Michigan Commission for the Blind Training Center. He took over the farm in 1977 when his father passed away, 20 years after they began producing pumpkins and squash. The original house had to be raised in 1972, due to the state widening M-43, but the original barn still remains, complemented with pumpkin-orange lean-tos on both sides.

Gene and his second wife of two years, Carol, are very enthusiastic about collecting pumpkin paraphernalia and are well known about town for driving an orange pickup truck, an orange tractor, and an orange Cadillac. On top of that, they are very bright and visible in the public eye in their orange clothing.

Now celebrating 50 years of being the “pumpkin man,” Gene attributes the farm’s success growing and selling winter squash and pumpkins to having a niche, being visible, and to some degree being a well-known and self-admitted eccentric. Most importantly, though, is treating everyone with respect the way he would want to be treated, he says.

With the help of his one full-time employee, Mark Schonten, Gene now owns 130 acres and farms another 22. Together they produce about 250 tons of pumpkins and 40 tons of squash annually — and everything is retailed on the farm. Each year they publish a cookbook and to date, Gene says he believes there have been 30,000 printed.

Customers ask for his pie pumpkins and winter squash by the brand name.

A past president of the Michigan Centennial Farm Association and a member of the Michigan Farm Bureau, Gene is working to get his land into farmland preservation. While he does have three children, none are interested in taking over the farm, but Gene does have a succession plan in 20-year-old Schonten, who has been working on the pumpkin farm since he was nine years old. He started with tasks like carrying bags of winter squash to older customers’ cars and now has been in charge of all harvesting and all employees for the past two years, Gene says.

“He and his father stopped and bought a tractor from me and at that time, he was nine years old,” Gene says. “A week or so later, I received a letter from him that I still have. He said, ‘I would like to come and volunteer to help you on Saturdays because I think it would be fun to work on the pumpkin farm.’ That was 11 years ago and he’s worked with me ever since.”

He says he plans to turn over the farm to Schonten in 2036. “I’ll be 100 years old and that will be close enough for Mark to take over,” Gene says with a hearty laugh. “And I plan to do just that. I’m going to die at 100 years old, standing in my yard, giving some little old lady a pie pumpkin.”

Direct comments or questions about this article to ldrotleff@meistermedia.com.