Thanks to the Durham Herald-Sun for the video and article.

Moving day: Ganyard Hill Farm closes

By AL CARSON : The Herald-Sun
Dec 14, 2000 : 6:50 pm ET

DURHAM -- It's funny, the old saying, "He bought the farm."

Because this time someone did buy it, and that will mean the death of many things that have been living on this small patch of land in East Durham. This terrain has been many things through the years that stretch back beyond our memory.

But with death, there is always a new beginning. And thus it will be at this farm, which will not grow crops for another year, but will sprout streets and houses and fences and basketball goals. And there will surely be children's laughter on the land once again.

Welcome to the Ganyard Barnyard at Ganyard Hill Farm, where pigeons flock, trying to steal a bit of crushed corn from the pigs, chickens, goats and ducks.

There is a donkey and sheep and lots of other farm creatures that will be looking for a new home. Most of the farm animals will be sold, and new stock will be bought for the new location. There is a lot of turnover anyway, because kids like the little baby animals.

"Uncle Bill" Weatherly retired in 1965 and that's when the barn was abandoned as a milking station. It was his father, A.C. Weatherly, who bought the property at the turn of the century and built the barn around 1920.

The farm was being used to raise tobacco when Milton Ganyard bought it from Weatherly's heirs in 1994. Ganyard has turned it into a real agri-"cultural" center, with a pumpkin patch and petting zoo.

Ganyard and his wife Karen, daughter Jill and brother Bob are the nucleus of the Ganyard Barnyard crew. They are joined by several hired hands that help run things from spring through fall.

In October, Milton Ganyard wore the look of a modern farmer, attired in athletic shoes, blue jeans, plaid shirt, baseball cap and dark glasses, as he drove the tractor that pulled the hayride, a long trailer loaded with bales of hay. Children and their parents sat in the back while the John Deere chugga-chugged its way around a circuit of the farm, finally stopping in the middle of the pumpkin fields. Then kids scampered to find the perfect pumpkin.

The farm has been a joy to Ganyard and his family as well as thousands of children who have flocked here each year to take hayrides, buy pumpkins and pet farm animals.

Ganyard, 57, comes from four generations of dairy farmers. But he went off to school in Athens and studied agricultural science. He has lived in this area since 1971, and owned "a small high-tech research company" that tested pesticides for residue levels on food, human exposure and leaching into ground water.

"We did work under contract and we finished our contracts and phased out of that and phased into this," he explained.

He and his wife Karen bought the farm in 1994. Over the years, they have gotten help from his daughter Jill and his brother Bob, retired from IBM. But now Ganyard has made a deal with developers and if the Durham zoning board agrees, he will be vacating the premises after the first of the year.

But this is not the end. The farm is not "closing."

"We're not shutting down. We're relocating," said Shannon Ignatowski, who has three kids of her own. She works the register during the week in the busy season and runs parties for kids on weekends - "multi-tasking," she called it.

"I came up here and spent a whole lot of money and my husband told me I needed to recoup some of it," she said with a laugh, explaining how she ended up at the farm.

"I just walked in one day and they looked like they were going crazy and shorthanded and I asked if I could have a job and they said, 'When can you start?' "

Ignatowski said the new farm will be within 30 minutes of the old one.

"That's what Milt promised me," she said. "I can't drive too far."

Ganyard has a large map of Durham and Chapel Hill hanging on a back wall of the barn at the farm. There are several circles drawn on it in red ink.

He wants to find a place that is near enough to Durham so that people will come if he builds it.

"We don't have any kind of a date set yet," said Ganyard, who is looking for a spot to lease land for next season. "We know that we will relocate sometime next year and have our new location set up for this time of year, in the fall."

By the time October rolls around, parents start bringing their kids to the farm to pick out the perfect pumpkin. Ganyard has been scouting around the Triangle, looking for the right spot to keep them coming.

"I need at least 30 acres of tillable land where I can grow pumpkins. It would be really good to have a barn like that, to have as a headquarters for your retail, like we do here. And then we need a good pond for irrigation water."

Justin Davis is only 13, but he has been working at the farm four years.

"He's no kin, but he's been working here since he was 9," Ganyard said with a laugh. "He came and told me he wanted to work and said he was 10."

While Ganyard could not hire Davis because of his age, he accepted the youngster's offer to volunteer. And money is being tucked away in a savings account for his education.

"I get lots of compliments on what a fine young man he is," Ganyard said. "People cannot believe he is only 13."

Jane Loveless is one of several workers who keep the farm going in summer and fall.

"I was an art major in school, but I'm 40 now and I'm a mom and I work at the farm," she said, very matter-of-factly. "I love the farm. The happiest job in the world for me is this place."

Loveless sells pumpkins and teaches children how to carve them and paint on them.

The planting begins in the spring, according to Loveless, who said she wasn't around then.

"I do a lot of seasonal work," she said. "They bloom, the vines get really big and then they start producing. I can even take you out to the patch and show you the difference between a female and a male flower. I know all about the pumpkin patch."

When it comes to Halloween night, Loveless does not hang out in the pumpkin patch waiting for the great pumpkin.

"I dress up and answer my door in costume," she said. "It's my favorite holiday, because you can have so much fun with it."

There is a Haunted Cornfield out back of the barn, and while it makes an interesting maze for children to navigate, there is no corn in this field.

"Only about three people have mentioned that," Milton said with a big grin. "It's Sudex, a hybrid cross between Sudan grass and sorghum. I can just fling the seed our there and disc it in and it grows nice and fast."

After Halloween, most of the help is out of work as things slow down.

"After 31 days without a break, we can use some downtime," said Ganyard, who had just taken several employees out to eat at The Grove Restaurant, just down the road. Lunch consisted of stew beef and gravy over rice, with black-eyed peas, banana pudding and "40 gallons of iced tea," said brother Bob, who was hanging out in the old barn at the farm.

The dairy barn was renovated into a farmer's market, where produce is sold alongside home canned goods. The barn overlooks a small pond, where geese and ducks roam the banks and bass, catfish and perch thrill youngsters with cane poles.

But it is too cold to fish and the ducks and geese have the run of the pond banks.

"The Canada geese come and go. They don't roost here," Ganyard said. "I don't know where they roost, but they will leave out just at dark.

"And then there is a flock of Toulouse geese that we brought here. One of the Toulouse ganders mated with a Canada goose about three years ago and has stayed with her ever since. He goes with their flock. When they fly out to the pumpkin field to eat grass, he goes with them. But if they leave the grounds, he remains on the farm."

When he first took over this land, Ganyard considered growing pick-your-own strawberries. But a little research changed his mind.

"Strawberries are expensive to grow and it can really be tricky," he said. "You get a late frost or a hot spell in May and you lose everything."

So he decided to go with pumpkins, even though it is harder to grow pumpkins here than in Ohio, in the pumpkin belt.

"Here the higher temperature is tougher on pumpkins and the insects and diseases are much tougher. You can do it, but you have to know what you are doing and it is very expensive."

Each fall the fields flourish with the green and orange orbs and so many children come to pick their own that the farm cannot meet the demand, so pumpkins must be shipped in to supplement the Ganyard harvest.

While pumpkins are pretty and make nice autumnal ornaments, the harvest is focused on Halloween. The orange orbs are not much in demand after that.

"The pumpkin market tends to die with Halloween," Ganyard said. "We sell a few after that, if we've got them. And we sell cornstalks for fall decoration, but we have a pretty slow period in early November, until the Christmas trees come in. And then we make wreathes and roping and sell trees from Sparta, grown on a farm in Allegheny County."

As visitors make what is probably their last trip to this Ganyard Hill Farm, there are signs welcoming them in: "Please Drive Slow," "Mulch Closeout Sale," and "Christmas Trees for Sale."

The last of the pumpkins have been gleaned from the fields and the sheep and goats and chickens are feasting on smashed pumpkins.

There were 550 Christmas trees on the farm in late November and the remainder of those is about all that is left for sale, those few trees and some firewood.

"That number is geared to what I think I can sell out of between the 15th and the 20th," said Milton Ganyard. "You don't want to still be selling them the week before Christmas.

"It's fun when people come in to buy trees because they want to. But it's not fun when they start coming to buy because they have to."

The farmhouse and barn sit quietly beside an old tractor that has been stripped down and is being rebuilt. An ancient rusted-out manure spreader sits forlornly in the parking lot. It needs a lot of work, but for right now, brother Bob has gotten the wheels where they will roll, so it can move along.

Bigger, louder, more powerful machines will soon take their place - bulldozers and huge graders, to take the land and shape it anew, preparing it for its latest incarnation.