October 8, 2025 • 19 mins
This week on The American Family Farmer, we’re taking you to Ottawa Lake, Michigan, where family tradition and community spirit come alive at Gust Brother’s Pumpkin Farm. Owner and farmer Nate Gust joins us to share the story of how his family’s 1/4-acre pumpkin patch has grown into a beloved fall destination in the greater Toledo area.
From you-pick pumpkin patches and colorful mums to hayrides, corn mazes, and a barn full of farm animals, Gust Brother’s offers a hands-on farm experience for families looking to connect with agriculture in a fun and memorable way. Nate also talks about the farm’s history, the importance of agritourism, and how his family continues to balance tradition with growth while keeping their mission rooted in community.
Whether you’re drawn in by fresh cider and donuts, fall decorations, or a wholesome day on the farm, this episode is a reminder of how farms like Gust Brother’s bring people together while sustaining local agriculture.
Learn more at gustbrothers.com
Website: AmericanFamilyFarmerShow.com
Social Media: @GoodDayNetworks
From you-pick pumpkin patches and colorful mums to hayrides, corn mazes, and a barn full of farm animals, Gust Brother’s offers a hands-on farm experience for families looking to connect with agriculture in a fun and memorable way. Nate also talks about the farm’s history, the importance of agritourism, and how his family continues to balance tradition with growth while keeping their mission rooted in community.
Whether you’re drawn in by fresh cider and donuts, fall decorations, or a wholesome day on the farm, this episode is a reminder of how farms like Gust Brother’s bring people together while sustaining local agriculture.
Learn more at gustbrothers.com
Website: AmericanFamilyFarmerShow.com
Social Media: @GoodDayNetworks
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The American Family Farmer podcast sponsored in part by Caldron,
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out at toploss dot com. Up next here on The
American Family Farmer Nate gust who has a pumpkin farm
which is in Ottawa Lake, Michigan, which is right outside
of Toledo, and Toledo is one of my old stomping grounds,
(00:20):
having gone to school at Heidelberg College in Tiffan, Ohio,
which is down the road, and we just found out
talking before we went on the air, that we have
something in common. In fact, one of Nate's relatives probably
was at Heidelberg the same time I was, and maybe
enjoyed the fruits of working on farms in an area
where there was a good college. There were a lot
(00:42):
of those schools in Ohio, and it offered people like
me who wanted to have the farming continue my farming
experience by working on a farm there, and it was.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Although I must say, Nate, that I have never met
somebody whose sole purpose in life was to grow pumpkin.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
So how big?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What kind of a place are we talking about here?
How big is your farm?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Well? I tell you what we are. We're still a
traditional farm. We have twelve hundred and fifty acres is
what we farm total. It's very diverse corn, soy beans, wheat, hay,
and then we've been getting bigger and bigger in pumpkins
over the last twenty five thirty years. We have forty
acres of pumpkins and we sell most of them retail
right here in the front yard at market. So wow, yeah, yep,
(01:29):
so forty acres of pumpkins.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So how far what's the furthest traveler who comes there?
We must track it somehow or other. Where people come
from to get the pumpkins. How far away do they
travel to get good quality pumpkins at gust Brothers.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Oh my, we just had somebody this last weekend that
moved away. A lot of snowbirds here in southern Michigan,
northwest Ohio. And we had somebody that came comes back
every year from Florida. They moved down there. Snowbird moved
down to Florida full time. But they have to come
back and get fresh apple, cinnamon, don't and pumpkins and
they load up and heads south again. So yeah, we
(02:04):
got people all over the place. We got a pretty
good regional influence here. You know, we draw a lot
of people from an hour away. You know, ann Arbor's
just up the road forty minutes and Toledo's right in
our backyard, and so we get a pretty good regional
influence and even some you know, country travelers from all over.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
What would be if somebody who didn't know any better
ask you the question, what is the most surprising fact
about pumpkins that most people don't know?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I would say it is the fact that most canned pumpkin,
when you're buying pumpkin pie, most canned pumpkin is actually squash.
It's a Boston marrow squash that's grown, and it does
not when you're getting that canned pumpkin here for Thanksgiving time,
it is not a traditional jack landard that you're getting
(02:51):
in the can. So that's kind of an interesting fact.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, that is. So what do you recommend to people
who want to have a real authentic pumpkin pie? How
easy or not is you must have all kinds of
recipes and things things to do with pumpkins, right.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Ah, Well, we get we grow a lot of what
we call the pie pumpkin, which is just a smaller pumpkin,
lot of meat in it, very little, very few seeds,
and hollow space in the middle, a lot more meat.
And so a lot of people will recommend getting three
or four of these pie pumpkins and mashing them up
if you're gonna do the authentic pumpkin pie, or you know,
(03:30):
you can get the like a meteor squash of some kind,
like a Hubbard squash or a Boston marrow squash. But
we really don't recommend the you know, traditional big old
jack landard for pumpkin pie. That's those the reserve for
carving and decoration and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I would think that the meat inside a big pumpkin
like that would be kind of hard, wouldn't be wouldn't
lend itself well to cooking or making pies or things
like that. It's like anything else that's overgrown.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Am I right?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh, you're right, you're right. The more mature it is,
it makes it a little tougher. Just gotta cook it longer,
a little more seasoning, cook it longer, you'll be fine. So, yeah,
we actually don't. It's funny, we don't even do. We
saw a lot of butternut squash and stuff like that,
and really, to be honest with you, a lot of
that stuff even ends up in these fall decorations now
(04:22):
ends up in this fall displays, yeah, porch displays, and so.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
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Speaker 1 (05:25):
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here back on the American Family Farmer pumpkins for the holidays,
So how long? Nategust is the owner of the Gust
Brothers Pumpkin Farm, which is in Northwest well near it's
(05:46):
near Toledo on the Michigan side, but Northwest Ohio.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Got hundreds of acres.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Of crops and spends a lot of time growing pumpkins.
Have you come up with your own sort of hybrids
or do you use traditional seeds? I mean you must
be able to save the seeds and regrow. You probably
don't have to buy any seeds.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
At all, right, No, Actually, we start fresh every year,
believe it or not. With seeds. Yeah, it's it's very
difficult to keep and get enough germination the next year
by keeping and in a harbor's more disease, so it's
hard to really get a good crap by keeping your own.
We order new seeds every year from many different catalogs.
(06:29):
We scour trying to get the newest stuff. There's seed
breeders all over the place trying to develop the new, greatest,
best type pumpkin. And so we think we're on the
cutting edge getting the best of the best seed wise,
but yeah, we can't keep them.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So disease, that's not something that I would have come
up with as a correlation or a correlative to pumpkins.
What sort of diseases are pumpkins susceptible or any of
those squad what do we call that family? Squash and pumpkins?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
What are they called cook curbets, curbits, yep, co curbas,
however you want to say it wherever you're from in
the country. But yeah, lots of Yeah, disease is actually
it's a big problem in the pumpkin and squash area.
(07:21):
We get a bad UH in late July early August.
We get powdery mildew, real bad and downy mildew. It's
like a fungus UH that sets in and it will
kill those vines within a day or two if you
get it. And we have a lot of people come
to the farm and they say, man, I you know
I we planted our own pumpkin seas we wanted to
make your own pumpkins in the garden, and then late
(07:41):
July early August, they just turned white and died. And
that is powdery mildew is what happened to them. It's
very common, uh, And we we have to spray for
a fungicide very frequently just to keep them going all summer,
especially in these humid you know, Midwestern states.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So is the same problem likely to present in squashing
gorge and other reviny things that you're growing.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yes, yeah, same problem. It's all over in those cocurbent
crops you got all, but from the big to the little,
we spray them all together with the same fungicide to
keep them rolling. And it's almost a moss. We're actually
spraying every eight or nine days now, whereas years ago
we only sprayed probably every two or three weeks and
got away with it. And now I don't know if
(08:28):
it's hot or humid summers, or I don't know if
it's just more prevalent, but we got to spray often
to keep a very nice crop going.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
I'm gonna bet I'm gonna give you a third alternative there.
I'm gonna bet that, like with many other things that
you use herbicides on the plants or whatever it is
that you're trying to get rid of, become resistant and
they learn how to live around it. So there's always
a need for something new, something different to combat the
(08:57):
stuff that Mother Nature or whoever's in charge of all
the bad stuff that grows in our food supply. Those things,
we've come up with, some good things. I'm not much
of a believer in spraying and stuff, and I know
I have to encounter problems like I'm chopping corn now
for my cows, and I cultivate the corn, but the
(09:19):
weeds still will grow in where the you know, obviously
in the rows of corn, there's gonna be some weeds
and my chopper doesn't like it. But I'll be damned
if I'm gonna spray.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And so that's just my philosophy.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Some people just don't, you know, they'd rather make sure
that they don't have to deal with that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
But in this circumstance, it.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Sounds like you would, really you could get wiped out
if you didn't have the ability to.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Treat this fungus whatever it is. That's what it sounds.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, yeah, you couldn't hardly do it. I don't know.
We were talking the other day. I don't know if
you could really grow without spraying fung of sight on
a pumpkin crop anymore, especially here in the Midwest. Maybe
different parts of the country where it's dryer. But yeah,
very difficult and something we got to stay on top
of and just to get a nice crop.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Well, now, so in terms of what happens with the seeds,
I was just thinking something as I because I raised
jersey replacement heifer's and am a cow guy, and every year,
at the end of the season, I go around and
collect pumpkins from all of the farms or in some
cases go to the grocery stores and we chop up.
(10:29):
We put the pumpkins through a grinder, feed them to
the cows, and then when I spread the manure, I
have pumpkins growing everywhere.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So excuse me, I wondered about that.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I have a field that I'm chopping now, and we
got lots of pumpkins growing, and so I would just
the reason I bring it up is because you said
it was hard to get them to grow. Maybe you
got to put them through a cow in order to regrow.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Them, just put them through a cow. No, no, Actually,
pumpkins are very easy to grow. They come up anywhere.
They'll pump out of the ground, they'll sprout, theill germinate.
It's just hard to get them to the end, get
them to the finish line with a nice you know,
making new pumpkins. But yeah, cows love pumpkins. We turn
our cows every year. Yeah, we turn our cows out
(11:15):
every year and they eat the remnants of the pumpkins.
We put electric fence around the field and it works
out great.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
What do you have for cattle? What are you raising
cattle there on the farm.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
We got a small herd of beef cows, primarily Angus
limousine cross and people like to see them. People come
to see them on the farm. Here we have fall calves.
They have calves in the fall here for people to
look at. And but we keep them year around as
like a smaller herd of cattle just to like you said,
graze the pumpkins and eat up a little bit of
(11:47):
bad hay and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I know that. So are you open?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Are you doing a lot of agrituris in there? That
would be a suggestion after hearing what you just said.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yeah, that's our big thing here really is aggartour. Every
day we're getting ready right now for school group to come.
We do two to three school groups a day. Last
year we had I think four thousand kids visited the farm.
We do you know, sighter, don't. We make our own
sighter and donuts. We do hay rides. We do all
(12:17):
the traditional fall stuff, but we try to do it
in the scope of a real farm. You know. We
don't do a lot of the cannons and the rides
and all that. We try to make it like you're
visiting a real working farm and I just enjoy the day,
you know.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's the way I see it.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I do tours on my farm on the weekend. Saturday
and Sunday, we do hay rides so people can ride
out in the pasture and meet the cows. We feed
them bread and they kids just love it. The screams,
Oh my god, it's so much fun. And you can
have that and still and teach people about animals in
this circumstance and not to be afraid of something just
because it's big, Which reminds me. Do you have any
(12:56):
contests for the biggest.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Pumpkin we have those around here?
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Or do you have any of that kind of stuff
going on on your farm?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Oh, there's that. We don't have one here in our farm.
The neighbors up the road near Dundee have a giant
pumpkin contest every year. We grow some big pumpkins, but
we don't. There's a variety called dill alambic giant that
that those guys are growing. They're getting them up to
sixteen hundred pounds or more. We got just a few.
Our biggest every year is probably two three hundred pounds
two hundred and fifty three hundred. So we do our
(13:25):
best to grow a few big ones. But then if
they're too big, no one wants to buy them, right
because they can't get them, they can't handle them.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Okay, So I'm reminded of something that happened a few
years ago. My neighbor and I had a contest between
each other.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
He said, I.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Cheated because I threw a lot of common were around
the sheet and the pumpkin as it was growing.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But I got a pumpkin of waiting.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
We had to use the U bucketloader on the tractor
to get it. It was fourteen hundred and some odd
pounds and at the end of the day, okay, we
had fun with it and then we broke it.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
As you said, the cows loved it and that was
the end of that. But it was what's fun.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
People loved coming to see it. We're talking to Nate
Gust who has Gust Brothers pumpkin farm in the Toledo area.
This seems to be Ohio month. Last week we talked
to a lady from the other side of the state
in Connyat who had blueberries and chestnuts.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
On her farm.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
It was kind of an interesting so much diversification. Now
it's kind of cool so at anyway, we continue in,
mister augusta a matter of moments.
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Speaker 1 (17:09):
Back now with Nate guests for a couple of more
minutes from gust Brothers pumpkin Farm in the northwest corner
of Ohio near Michigan. How much you pick versus you pick,
you pick them or they pick them. How much of
that do you have?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Oh man, we got a big u picked field of
our forty acres, probably fifteen as you pick, and it's
been going up and up over the years. Years ago,
at you know, twenty years ago, everybody just wanted the
perfect pumpkin in the front yard. But now I would
say half of the pumpkins, if not more, are picked
right out of the field. So they will pick that
fifteen acre field clean here by the end of October,
(17:47):
assuming the weather stays good. But people we got big wagons,
and people go out as a family and go find
that perfect pumpkin. So they love it, and it's become
more and more popular. Get that picture, put it on
the you know facebooker, and and so yeah, a lot,
a lot of you pick here?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
How do you price things? How do you know how
to charge? Judge by the pumpkin, by the pound. I've
always wondered how guys like you with with a crop
like this, how do.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
You know what to charge?
Speaker 3 (18:16):
And you're doing, you know, so much business in such
a short period of time. It's you don't have a
lot of time to like weigh every pumpkin and do
all that. So what we do we just line up,
we have some rows right as they walk in, and
then we say we price them according to the rows.
So they're gonna be about that size, you know. We
got a three dollars all the way through ten dollars
(18:36):
pretty much, and we say it's going to be very
close to that. And if they argue with us and say, oh,
I think that's a four instead of a five, we say,
we say, you're right, it's a four, and we round down.
We make it easy. We make the customer, you know,
happy every time, and so we do our best to
size them up. But we don't have time to weigh
(18:58):
them or to put them through a you know whole
that is this big or this big. You know, we
do our best just just to judge them yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I would think, yep, I just I get a large
charge out of I'm looking at some of the pictures
from your website and the wagons and things that people
must use, and the things that you make or other
people make.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
It's just really a good, well rounded facility.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It seems to be the chicks that are there, so
good for you.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
I'm glad to have you.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Tell us the story of your success and continued success
to you, Nate and your family. Nate Gust who is
from Gust Brothers Pumpkin Farm in Ohio and the website
pretty Easy. Gust Brothers dot com is the website Gust
Brothers dot com.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
This program was produced at Bobksound and Recording. Please visit
bobksound dot com.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The American Familyfarmer podcast sponsored in part by Caldron, which
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The Safe, proven Way to lose weight. Check it all
out at toploss dot com. Up next here on The
American Family Farmer Nate gust who has a pumpkin farm
which is in Ottawa Lake, Michigan, which is right outside
of Toledo, and Toledo is one of my old stomping grounds,
(00:20):
having gone to school at Heidelberg College in Tiffan, Ohio,
which is down the road, and we just found out
talking before we went on the air, that we have
something in common. In fact, one of Nate's relatives probably
was at Heidelberg the same time I was, and maybe
enjoyed the fruits of working on farms in an area
where there was a good college. There were a lot
(00:42):
of those schools in Ohio, and it offered people like
me who wanted to have the farming continue my farming
experience by working on a farm there, and it was.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Although I must say, Nate, that I have never met
somebody whose sole purpose in life was to grow pumpkin.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
So how big?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What kind of a place are we talking about here?
How big is your farm?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Well? I tell you what we are. We're still a
traditional farm. We have twelve hundred and fifty acres is
what we farm total. It's very diverse corn, soy beans, wheat, hay,
and then we've been getting bigger and bigger in pumpkins
over the last twenty five thirty years. We have forty
acres of pumpkins and we sell most of them retail
right here in the front yard at market. So wow, yeah, yep,
(01:29):
so forty acres of pumpkins.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So how far what's the furthest traveler who comes there?
We must track it somehow or other. Where people come
from to get the pumpkins. How far away do they
travel to get good quality pumpkins at gust Brothers.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Oh my, we just had somebody this last weekend that
moved away. A lot of snowbirds here in southern Michigan,
northwest Ohio. And we had somebody that came comes back
every year from Florida. They moved down there. Snowbird moved
down to Florida full time. But they have to come
back and get fresh apple, cinnamon, don't and pumpkins and
they load up and heads south again. So yeah, we
(02:04):
got people all over the place. We got a pretty
good regional influence here. You know, we draw a lot
of people from an hour away. You know, ann Arbor's
just up the road forty minutes and Toledo's right in
our backyard, and so we get a pretty good regional
influence and even some you know, country travelers from all over.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
What would be if somebody who didn't know any better
ask you the question, what is the most surprising fact
about pumpkins that most people don't know?
Speaker 3 (02:31):
I would say it is the fact that most canned pumpkin,
when you're buying pumpkin pie, most canned pumpkin is actually squash.
It's a Boston marrow squash that's grown, and it does
not when you're getting that canned pumpkin here for Thanksgiving time,
it is not a traditional jack landard that you're getting
(02:51):
in the can. So that's kind of an interesting fact.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, that is. So what do you recommend to people
who want to have a real authentic pumpkin pie? How
easy or not is you must have all kinds of
recipes and things things to do with pumpkins, right.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Ah, Well, we get we grow a lot of what
we call the pie pumpkin, which is just a smaller pumpkin,
lot of meat in it, very little, very few seeds,
and hollow space in the middle, a lot more meat.
And so a lot of people will recommend getting three
or four of these pie pumpkins and mashing them up
if you're gonna do the authentic pumpkin pie, or you know,
(03:30):
you can get the like a meteor squash of some kind,
like a Hubbard squash or a Boston marrow squash. But
we really don't recommend the you know, traditional big old
jack landard for pumpkin pie. That's those the reserve for
carving and decoration and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I would think that the meat inside a big pumpkin
like that would be kind of hard, wouldn't be wouldn't
lend itself well to cooking or making pies or things
like that. It's like anything else that's overgrown.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Am I right?
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Oh, you're right, you're right. The more mature it is,
it makes it a little tougher. Just gotta cook it longer,
a little more seasoning, cook it longer, you'll be fine. So, yeah,
we actually don't. It's funny, we don't even do. We
saw a lot of butternut squash and stuff like that,
and really, to be honest with you, a lot of
that stuff even ends up in these fall decorations now
(04:22):
ends up in this fall displays, yeah, porch displays, and so.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, Hold on a second, we're talking Ton eight gusts.
Who's a pumpkin farmer here in the American family farmer.
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Speaker 1 (05:25):
Caldrin Elizabeth Miller from top loss dot com and Caldron
here back on the American Family Farmer pumpkins for the holidays,
So how long? Nategust is the owner of the Gust
Brothers Pumpkin Farm, which is in Northwest well near it's
(05:46):
near Toledo on the Michigan side, but Northwest Ohio.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Got hundreds of acres.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Of crops and spends a lot of time growing pumpkins.
Have you come up with your own sort of hybrids
or do you use traditional seeds? I mean you must
be able to save the seeds and regrow. You probably
don't have to buy any seeds.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
At all, right, No, Actually, we start fresh every year,
believe it or not. With seeds. Yeah, it's it's very
difficult to keep and get enough germination the next year
by keeping and in a harbor's more disease, so it's
hard to really get a good crap by keeping your own.
We order new seeds every year from many different catalogs.
(06:29):
We scour trying to get the newest stuff. There's seed
breeders all over the place trying to develop the new, greatest,
best type pumpkin. And so we think we're on the
cutting edge getting the best of the best seed wise,
but yeah, we can't keep them.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So disease, that's not something that I would have come
up with as a correlation or a correlative to pumpkins.
What sort of diseases are pumpkins susceptible or any of
those squad what do we call that family? Squash and pumpkins?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
What are they called cook curbets, curbits, yep, co curbas,
however you want to say it wherever you're from in
the country. But yeah, lots of Yeah, disease is actually
it's a big problem in the pumpkin and squash area.
(07:21):
We get a bad UH in late July early August.
We get powdery mildew, real bad and downy mildew. It's
like a fungus UH that sets in and it will
kill those vines within a day or two if you
get it. And we have a lot of people come
to the farm and they say, man, I you know
I we planted our own pumpkin seas we wanted to
make your own pumpkins in the garden, and then late
(07:41):
July early August, they just turned white and died. And
that is powdery mildew is what happened to them. It's
very common, uh, And we we have to spray for
a fungicide very frequently just to keep them going all summer,
especially in these humid you know, Midwestern states.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
So is the same problem likely to present in squashing
gorge and other reviny things that you're growing.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yes, yeah, same problem. It's all over in those cocurbent
crops you got all, but from the big to the little,
we spray them all together with the same fungicide to
keep them rolling. And it's almost a moss. We're actually
spraying every eight or nine days now, whereas years ago
we only sprayed probably every two or three weeks and
got away with it. And now I don't know if
(08:28):
it's hot or humid summers, or I don't know if
it's just more prevalent, but we got to spray often
to keep a very nice crop going.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
I'm gonna bet I'm gonna give you a third alternative there.
I'm gonna bet that, like with many other things that
you use herbicides on the plants or whatever it is
that you're trying to get rid of, become resistant and
they learn how to live around it. So there's always
a need for something new, something different to combat the
(08:57):
stuff that Mother Nature or whoever's in charge of all
the bad stuff that grows in our food supply. Those things,
we've come up with, some good things. I'm not much
of a believer in spraying and stuff, and I know
I have to encounter problems like I'm chopping corn now
for my cows, and I cultivate the corn, but the
(09:19):
weeds still will grow in where the you know, obviously
in the rows of corn, there's gonna be some weeds
and my chopper doesn't like it. But I'll be damned
if I'm gonna spray.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
And so that's just my philosophy.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Some people just don't, you know, they'd rather make sure
that they don't have to deal with that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
But in this circumstance, it.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Sounds like you would, really you could get wiped out
if you didn't have the ability to.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Treat this fungus whatever it is. That's what it sounds.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, yeah, you couldn't hardly do it. I don't know.
We were talking the other day. I don't know if
you could really grow without spraying fung of sight on
a pumpkin crop anymore, especially here in the Midwest. Maybe
different parts of the country where it's dryer. But yeah,
very difficult and something we got to stay on top
of and just to get a nice crop.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Well, now, so in terms of what happens with the seeds,
I was just thinking something as I because I raised
jersey replacement heifer's and am a cow guy, and every year,
at the end of the season, I go around and
collect pumpkins from all of the farms or in some
cases go to the grocery stores and we chop up.
(10:29):
We put the pumpkins through a grinder, feed them to
the cows, and then when I spread the manure, I
have pumpkins growing everywhere.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
So excuse me, I wondered about that.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
I have a field that I'm chopping now, and we
got lots of pumpkins growing, and so I would just
the reason I bring it up is because you said
it was hard to get them to grow. Maybe you
got to put them through a cow in order to regrow.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Them, just put them through a cow. No, no, Actually,
pumpkins are very easy to grow. They come up anywhere.
They'll pump out of the ground, they'll sprout, theill germinate.
It's just hard to get them to the end, get
them to the finish line with a nice you know,
making new pumpkins. But yeah, cows love pumpkins. We turn
our cows every year. Yeah, we turn our cows out
(11:15):
every year and they eat the remnants of the pumpkins.
We put electric fence around the field and it works
out great.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
What do you have for cattle? What are you raising
cattle there on the farm.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
We got a small herd of beef cows, primarily Angus
limousine cross and people like to see them. People come
to see them on the farm. Here we have fall calves.
They have calves in the fall here for people to
look at. And but we keep them year around as
like a smaller herd of cattle just to like you said,
graze the pumpkins and eat up a little bit of
(11:47):
bad hay and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I know that. So are you open?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Are you doing a lot of agrituris in there? That
would be a suggestion after hearing what you just said.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Yeah, that's our big thing here really is aggartour. Every
day we're getting ready right now for school group to come.
We do two to three school groups a day. Last
year we had I think four thousand kids visited the farm.
We do you know, sighter, don't. We make our own
sighter and donuts. We do hay rides. We do all
(12:17):
the traditional fall stuff, but we try to do it
in the scope of a real farm. You know. We
don't do a lot of the cannons and the rides
and all that. We try to make it like you're
visiting a real working farm and I just enjoy the day,
you know.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
That's the way I see it.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I do tours on my farm on the weekend. Saturday
and Sunday, we do hay rides so people can ride
out in the pasture and meet the cows. We feed
them bread and they kids just love it. The screams,
Oh my god, it's so much fun. And you can
have that and still and teach people about animals in
this circumstance and not to be afraid of something just
because it's big, Which reminds me. Do you have any
(12:56):
contests for the biggest.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Pumpkin we have those around here?
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Or do you have any of that kind of stuff
going on on your farm?
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Oh, there's that. We don't have one here in our farm.
The neighbors up the road near Dundee have a giant
pumpkin contest every year. We grow some big pumpkins, but
we don't. There's a variety called dill alambic giant that
that those guys are growing. They're getting them up to
sixteen hundred pounds or more. We got just a few.
Our biggest every year is probably two three hundred pounds
two hundred and fifty three hundred. So we do our
(13:25):
best to grow a few big ones. But then if
they're too big, no one wants to buy them, right
because they can't get them, they can't handle them.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Okay, So I'm reminded of something that happened a few
years ago. My neighbor and I had a contest between
each other.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
He said, I.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Cheated because I threw a lot of common were around
the sheet and the pumpkin as it was growing.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But I got a pumpkin of waiting.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
We had to use the U bucketloader on the tractor
to get it. It was fourteen hundred and some odd
pounds and at the end of the day, okay, we
had fun with it and then we broke it.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
As you said, the cows loved it and that was
the end of that. But it was what's fun.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
People loved coming to see it. We're talking to Nate
Gust who has Gust Brothers pumpkin farm in the Toledo area.
This seems to be Ohio month. Last week we talked
to a lady from the other side of the state
in Connyat who had blueberries and chestnuts.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
On her farm.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
It was kind of an interesting so much diversification. Now
it's kind of cool so at anyway, we continue in,
mister augusta a matter of moments.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
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Speaker 5 (16:10):
We're definitely going to be late to the concert. I
feel like we should be there by now.
Speaker 6 (16:14):
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Speaker 5 (16:16):
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Speaker 1 (17:09):
Back now with Nate guests for a couple of more
minutes from gust Brothers pumpkin Farm in the northwest corner
of Ohio near Michigan. How much you pick versus you pick,
you pick them or they pick them. How much of
that do you have?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Oh man, we got a big u picked field of
our forty acres, probably fifteen as you pick, and it's
been going up and up over the years. Years ago,
at you know, twenty years ago, everybody just wanted the
perfect pumpkin in the front yard. But now I would
say half of the pumpkins, if not more, are picked
right out of the field. So they will pick that
fifteen acre field clean here by the end of October,
(17:47):
assuming the weather stays good. But people we got big wagons,
and people go out as a family and go find
that perfect pumpkin. So they love it, and it's become
more and more popular. Get that picture, put it on
the you know facebooker, and and so yeah, a lot,
a lot of you pick here?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
How do you price things? How do you know how
to charge? Judge by the pumpkin, by the pound. I've
always wondered how guys like you with with a crop
like this, how do.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
You know what to charge?
Speaker 3 (18:16):
And you're doing, you know, so much business in such
a short period of time. It's you don't have a
lot of time to like weigh every pumpkin and do
all that. So what we do we just line up,
we have some rows right as they walk in, and
then we say we price them according to the rows.
So they're gonna be about that size, you know. We
got a three dollars all the way through ten dollars
(18:36):
pretty much, and we say it's going to be very
close to that. And if they argue with us and say, oh,
I think that's a four instead of a five, we say,
we say, you're right, it's a four, and we round down.
We make it easy. We make the customer, you know,
happy every time, and so we do our best to
size them up. But we don't have time to weigh
(18:58):
them or to put them through a you know whole
that is this big or this big. You know, we
do our best just just to judge them yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
I would think, yep, I just I get a large
charge out of I'm looking at some of the pictures
from your website and the wagons and things that people
must use, and the things that you make or other
people make.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
It's just really a good, well rounded facility.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
It seems to be the chicks that are there, so
good for you.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
I'm glad to have you.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Tell us the story of your success and continued success
to you, Nate and your family. Nate Gust who is
from Gust Brothers Pumpkin Farm in Ohio and the website
pretty Easy. Gust Brothers dot com is the website Gust
Brothers dot com.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
This program was produced at Bobksound and Recording. Please visit
bobksound dot com.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
The American Familyfarmer podcast sponsored in part by Caldron, which
is the safe way for you to lose weight and
keep it off.
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