What happens when you build a farm around what the customer actually wants? Tom Brown, owner of Meadowlark Farm Orchard and Cidery near Wichita, Kansas, joins Farm4Profit to share how international agricultural development work eventually led him to transform an 80-acre row crop farm into a pick-your-own orchard, agritourism destination, and hard cider business.
Tom Brown didn't grow up farming. After studying anthropology and horticulture at Kansas State, he spent roughly 15 years living and working in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he gained experience in agribusiness development, seed production, horticulture, and helping farmers improve their operations. When he eventually returned to the United States, the desire to build a farm of his own was still there.
Instead of starting with what he wanted to grow, Tom started by asking potential customers what they wanted to buy. The answer was fresh, pick-your-own peaches. He intentionally searched within a 30-minute drive of Wichita and purchased 80 acres in 2010 for $225,000.00. Today, Meadowlark includes roughly 18 acres of peaches, 17–18 acres of apples, two acres of strawberries, two acres of pumpkins, and a hard cider business.
Tom explains how agritourism changes the way a farmer thinks about everything from orchard layout and parking to crop selection and customer experience. Feedback from families helped drive Meadowlark's expansion into apples, while fallen fruit that could have become waste created an additional opportunity through hard cider. The result is a business built around multiple revenue streams rather than production alone.
The conversation also gets into the numbers. Tom uses Ambrook to help track the finances of a complicated operation with multiple enterprises and direct costs. As the orchard approaches its physical production limits, he sees future growth coming primarily from cider sales and on-farm experiences, which he believes could significantly increase gross revenue over the next five years. His biggest lesson applies well beyond specialty crops: farming changes slowly, mistakes are expensive, and “every lesson takes a year.”