It’s one of those beautiful September days in Manhattan, Kan. A morning where you just want to sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and admire the seasons changing.

Hugo and Andrea DeJesus don’t have much time to appreciate the weather, though. They’re busy trying to make sure all of the pieces of their working farm and agritourism venture are in place for the pumpkin picking crush that’s just about to pick up.

Welcome to A & H Farm, where families come to make memories and take home fresh, homegrown produce straight from the farmers who grew it. This fourth-generation family farm is located just a mile or so outside of the city limits, a perfect location for an agritourism venture. But that wasn’t always the plan.

Planting the seed

You might say Andrea’s parents planted the seed of her love of farming at a very young age. She says her formal farming education began at the tender age of 2 weeks, when her parents took her with them to their farmers market booth. She went to Kansas State University to study accounting, though.

While attending K-State, she met Hugo, who was stationed at Fort Riley, serving in communications. They married and were stationed at Fort Benning, Ga., and then Birmingham, Ala. Finally, in 2007, after Hugo medically retired as a sergeant E5, the couple decided it was time to come home to Manhattan and work on the family farm.

After some searching, in 2010, they purchased their first 113-acre farm from Andrea’s mother and started A & H Farm.

They started out raising fruits and vegetables for the farmers market, with row crops for rotation. But then they added some cattle, and invested in some more tillable and pasture acres, and the farm grew.

There was a point, Andrea says, where they needed to diversify their income if they were going to make farm payments. And that’s when they decided to open the farm to the public for four weekends in October.

“It was my husband and I, and a cousin that worked with us,” she recalls. “We were in a tent at the end of the road, no power, just a generator.”

They sold pumpkins that first year to fewer than 200 visitors.

Growing the farm

That seed of an idea grew exponentially in the next decade.

The pumpkin patch expanded into a Fall Festival that spread their risk out over more weekends. Then, they added more events throughout the year: Baby Animal Days to feature their petting zoo, the Lavender Bazaar to showcase their lavender field, the Sunflower Bazaar for those Instagram-worthy photos visitors crave, the Strawberry Festival for berry pickers and more. They recently added a 2,400-tree high-density apple orchard to expand their u-pick offerings during Fall Festival.

After all, where better to pick apples than “The Little Apple”?

As more visitors found their way a mile outside of Manhattan to A & H Farm, the DeJesuses added the Kid Zone for families to make those special memories, with photo backdrops, a giant slide, a rope maze, a tug of war, princess playhouses, a rock wall, climbing tires and more.

But then, they saw the need for something for the adults. So, Hugo built the Grain Bin, a bakery and bar that serves alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages. They also added a concert stage for entertainment and opened up to corporate events.

A & H Farm grew a reputation in the community as a place to enjoy a bit of the “farm life,” and in 2022, they estimate they had more than 25,000 visitors.

Hugo and Andrea talk over each new attraction or additional side venture to make sure it fits into their overall goals. Andrea credits Hugo with making so many of their dreams come true. He’s designed and built every attraction on their farm from scratch.

“A lot of it is, how do we use the structure we already have for another activity?” Andrea says. For example, when a windstorm took the plastic from one of their high tunnels, they turned it into a budgie aviary where visitors can walk inside and experience the birds in flight around them.

One of their biggest leaps of faith was building and opening a year-round farm store in 2021 that doubles as their family living quarters. The store features local goods from vendors they’ve met at farmers markets.

Andrea and Hugo say it’s very important for them to carry products from folks just like themselves who are starting out and may not have a farmers market presence just yet, but could really benefit from having access to a market all year.

“Supporting small businesses is really important to us, and supporting other farmers as well,” Andrea says. It’s something they’ve committed to modeling for their eight children: Hugo Jr., Andrew, Barbra, Ana, Andrea, Richard, Rebeka and Clara.

They look at their employees, their vendor partners, and their family and friends as part of a larger team helping grow their farm and helping spread ag education to the public. “If you’ve got the right people behind you, that makes life easier,” Hugo says.

That community mindset helped them weather the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

As president of the Downtown Farmers Market of Manhattan, Andrea knew that opening it up for the season was vital for the area. She went to bat for her fellow vendors, and they created a method for reopening that was copied by other markets around Kansas.

For the DeJesuses, community doesn’t stop at your city limits. Andrea lead the way to bring SNAP benefits and Power of Produce programs and grants to the farmers markets to expand access to low-income families or families at risk in their community.

Working farm

Despite the constant flux of visitors to the agritourism side, Andrea and Hugo say the farming side is still their main focus. They raise a full line of produce — from asparagus to zucchini and every letter in between. They take their produce to farmers markets in Manhattan, Overland Park, Salina and Junction City, and sell it through their farm store and through farm-to-table boxes.

They have three high tunnels on the farm where they raise vegetables for early-season shoppers. But they also raise produce in the field, rotating with soybeans, corn, sorghum and wheat.

Soil health and conservation are important to the farm, but it’s also an important message to share with visitors about how they grow their crops, they say. Educating their visitors about farming, from teaching about how late frosts hurt their apple crop, to helping them connect the food on their plate to the farmer who grew it is important, Hugo says.

“The more people can share and show what they do on their operations, I think we shrink the disconnect a little,” he says. “People don’t know because they don’t see. And people don’t learn because nobody told them.”

The DeJesuses use their livestock to clean the vegetable and pumpkin fields and the corn maze after harvest, and teach visitors about the fertilizer benefits they leave behind. They also use no-till on almost all of their row crops, and as little tillage as possible for the fruits and vegetables. They plant rye as a cover crop, for winter grazing, as organic material for the vegetables, and sometimes as hay.

“Our goal is to have a crop growing at least 350 days of the year,” Hugo says.

The sun has risen a little higher in the sky, and Hugo and Andrea need to get back to the hustle of farm chores, children’s schedules, deliveries and helping customers choose the best produce for their tables.

And they wouldn’t have it any other way.