Sarah Frey: Founder of Frey Farms, Author, and "Pumpkin Queen"

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. This episode's remarkable guest is Sarah Fry. She is known as the Pumpkin Queen of America. That's because she grows more pumpkins than any other farmer in America. In 2016, she sold 5 million pumpkins. She was raised on an 80 acre farm without indoor plumbing in southern Illinois. It is 260 miles south of Chicago, 99 miles east of St. Louis, and 127 miles northwest of Owensboro, Kentucky. She attended high school and college at the same time. While working at Tractor Supply, she borrowed $10,000 at 16 to start a melon business. At 18, she bought her parents farm and built it into the Frye Farm brand that today sells fruits, vegetables and beverages. She has written two books for the Love of Pumpkins, A Visual Guide to Fall Decorating with Pumpkins and Ornamentals, and very recently, the Growing Season How I Saved an American Farm and Built a New Life. In this episode, you'll learn about the lessons of bootstrapping out of rural poverty, the combative nature of chickens, how God talked to her via a full harvest moon, how a snapping turtle altered her life, why stealing thunder is a good thing to do, and how to get into the back door of Walmart. If you're a small business owner who is trying to bootstrap your way to success, this is the episode for you. But we start with a discussion of chickens because Sarah had a traumatic run in with a chicken when she was a kid and I wanted an update on that. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest 2. Taking notes while being briefed about a speaking gig 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches 4. Storing manuals for all the gizmos that I buy 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. And now here is the pumpkin queen of America, Sarah Fry. Now that you run the farm, do you have any chickens?

I don't currently have chickens, but I have had chickens in my adult life with my children. When my kids were 7 and 9, they wanted to get chickens, so I took them to this fantastic little Amish market where they trained and swap all of these different little animals. And they found these really interesting chickens that they liked and I let them bring the chickens home. And my brother John and I actually devoted probably a week to building like this chicken penthouse. We had this. We made this hen house really solid, like two by fours on this really awesome trailer. It was a mobile channel chicken coop that we could pull around the farm. I'm telling you, it was like a really high end RV for the chicken.

So this was the Airstream of. The Airstream of chicken coops.

Yes, we had a chicken coop Airstream, there's no question. I mean, once we got into building it, we just couldn't stop, you know what I mean? Then we wanted like really awesome hinges on the little hidden boxes and. And then it was like, oh, okay, well, you don't want to have to reach your hand into this dark chicken box. So you want to be able to access it from the outside and the ins inside and let the light go through. And it was just. We went a little crazy on the chicken coop. But anyway, we saw the chicken coop but not the chickens.

I would have thought the eggs just drop out the bottom and go right into the carton and butter, bing, butter, bang.

We didn't make. It wasn't quite that fancy, but I actually saw the last chicken on this farm. This raccoon was coming down the hill and he was like loping along and he had a chicken under his little arm. And when he saw me in the car, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. So I stopped the car and I look at this raccoon and he's like carrying this chicken and he like stands up and looks at me like, yeah, I got the last chicken. See you, lady. And I felt so bad. And so we haven't had chickens since.

But people may be wondering, what the hell is Guy Talking about, like, why did he ask her about chickens? But as a moment of explanation in your book, you had this great story about how chickens used to terrorize you. So I. I take it you got over that trauma.

I still don't. I still don't just love things with feathers. I like to look at birds. I don't like to touch things like that. But, yes, being growing up on this small family farm in southern Illinois, that was one of my most dreaded jobs, was having to, like, collect the eggs. And our hens, they weren't, like, tame, really sweet hens. They were big, fat, mean hens that didn't want to give up their eggs that easily. And the one had pecked my hand. That's why I was so worried. And when I talk about, you know, when I was pretending as a little girl to hunt, all of my brothers were older. I had four older brothers, and they went off to school. So I had this BB gun, and I'm running around the farm, and I'm trying to entertain myself with this big imagination. I'm like, ooh, I'm a big game hunter. I'm stalking my prey. And then I see the chicken that had pecked my hand, the big, black speckled hen. And I know that I can't actually kill the chicken. I have no desire to kill the chicken. But I'm so in character in this moment that I really do aim for the chicken. But in my mind, my rational mind says, the BB's gonna drop. It'll never get anywhere near the chicken. But when I pulled the trigger, I shot and killed the chicken. It killed the chicken flapping violently in the yard. And I thought, oh, my gosh. My head swivels around. I'm like, did any see that? Where's my mom? Where's my dad? Did they just see me kill this chicken that gave us all of these eggs? And then I thought, oh, my God, I'm going to be accused of murder in the first degree. My father's going to know. This is the same kind of chicken that pecked my hand and drew blood. And they're going to. They're just going to think I'm this terrible kid that murdered this chicken on purpose. So instead of telling Guy in the book, if you remember, I hide the body. So I have to go pick this heavy chicken up and run down the back road with it and throw it into a ravine, never to be heard, seen, or heard of again. And then I never spoke of it until I was, like, 20 years old.

You could have formed A partnership with that Raccoon family way back then.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, okay, one more off the wall question that I have for you is that how many people do you know got the joke about the full harvest moon when you were trying to buy the farm from the preachers?

Oh my gosh, I don't know. But I'll tell you what, Guy and I will share this with you before we get off of this podcast, but with you and only you, because there's a photo. I knew that no one would ever believe that when I was sitting there that night at that little swanky little hillbilly bar, having my dinner, thinking about having spent the day with those preachers, trying to buy this piece of property from them and knowing that in their mind they had to have God give them a sign as to whether they were going to sell me the property or not. And I was sitting there and I'm reflecting on my own relationship with God and I thought, I don't know, just what would that be like? What would that feel like if God talked to me? The pumpkin coin? Like, what would God say to the Pumpkin Queen? Now mind you, I had told these preachers from Oklahoma, I swore to them that if they sold me the property, I wasn't going to develop it, I wasn't going to let cookie cutter houses pop up all over it. And I wouldn't subdivide it and I would keep it for agriculture use. In fact, I would grow pumpkins on it. And I'm thinking in my mind as I'm thinking about how God talks to people and maybe like, well, maybe he talks to me too. And I just don't. Maybe I just don't listen. And then in that moment, I'm thinking about my interaction that day with these, with these preachers. And I look to my left and this man, I swear he was £300, drops his britches in the middle of the dance floor. This whole evening couldn't have gotten any weirder. I was in this in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, and there was a 50s pin up girl contest going on in this little bar cafe where I was having dinner. And then this big man drops his pants in the middle of the dance floor and he has a full pumpkin tattooed Jack o' Lantern pumpkin. Not just a pumpkin. I'm talking Jack o' Lantern pumpkin with the face carved in it and everything. One tattooed to each cheek. And I thought, oh my God, there it is. That's my sign from God. That's how God talks to me. That is how God talks to me. And I thought no one. I knew the story. I was like, I was in shock. And I thought, no one will ever believe the day that I've had and how it just ended. No one will ever believe me. So I get my phone out, and I think, how do you ask someone if you can take a picture of their butt? And I know my face is red at this point, and I mean, all of these girls that were in this little contest, they were gasping and giggling and laughing. And I just walked over there and I gave my phone to one of the girls, and I said. And then I asked the man, I said, do you mind if I get a picture? No, I took a picture first. So that's what happened. So I said, can I have a picture? He's like, sure. And he's mooning me with these pumpkin tattoos. And I start to walk away, and then I think, no one's going to believe me. So I turn around, I hand my phone to one of the pinup girls in the contest, and I said, you know what? I have to get in this picture. So I like, point. I'm like, there it is right there.

Do you have this picture?

I have the picture. I'm going to show you the picture. But it's not something that I can use, like, in promoting the book, because it's this man's big full harvest moon putt.

Are you sure that I can't use it in promoting the podcast?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's a really great picture, actually. Look on my face. This is really happening right now.

This is. You can't make this shit up.

Oh, no, you can't. You totally can't make it up. I mean, my whole life guy, though, think about it. My whole life from the time I was a little girl until sitting here today, like, there. There is so much in the book and. But then there have been so many things that I really couldn't put in the book that have happened in my lifetime that are just, you cannot make it up. It's just. It's. And I don't. Honestly, I think about my life moving forward, and I think, at some point, does my life get boring or do I keep. Like, at some point when does. When do things kind of calm down for me? You know what I mean? And then I wonder if I didn't like it to be calm or to be normal. You know what I mean? So I've got here. I'm going to show you the picture. I'm going to. I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you the picture of the harvest moon.

It's not your. It's not your desktop?

No. It's not my screensaver? No, it's not. No. So here it is. I don't know if you can see it or not.

Okay, hold that there. Hold that there. Hold that there. Hold that there. Oh, my God.

Mm.

See, this is the difference. This is the difference between a Guy Kawasaki podcast and npr. Because can you imagine Terry Gross putting that picture up? There's no way. There's no way at all. Okay, so now I got my two compelling questions out of the way. We can go on to other things. First of all, please tell the story of growing up in rural Illinois. That is an adventure in and of itself.

Most people, when they think of Illinois, they think of the city Chicago, right? It's like, you know, I've gotten into cabs and Ubers and, oh, where are you from? People ask you where you're from. You travel and say Illinois and say, oh, Chicago. I like every time it's like they're going to say Chicago. And it's not that I don't love the city of Chicago. I love Chicago. That's my city. But I didn't grow up anywhere near Chicago. I grew up in southern Illinois, which is much closer to Kentucky than it is Chicago. And it's very. It's a very rural area. Southern Illinois is litter. It's like little small towns scattered out throughout the bottom half of the state. It's very beautiful down here. It's not flat. So when most people think of Illinois, too, like the farmland in Illinois, they think of the flat prairie land. But once you get of, say, i70, the landscape starts to gradually change. And where I live, there are more trees and more rolling hills. There are lakes, rivers, streams. And the landscape really starts to become, you know, very beautiful, very interesting. And I like to say that we probably have some of the most beautiful sunsets in southern Illinois that I've ever seen. I've been to Montana. You see the big. The sunsets in Montana, you know, the crazy colors and how beautiful they are. And I would put our sunsets here in southern Illinois up against the sunsets in Montana anytime, because they're gorgeous. But I grew up on a small, struggling family farm, and I write about my experience growing up in rural poverty on this small farm in southern Illinois in my memoir, the Growing Season. And I had four older brothers. And when I was a little girl, I did not realize because there were so many good things, like growing up in nature, being outside. You'd think having. Not having heat or air or running water or like, some. Like, the basic necessities that we all take for granted now, like, you would think that would have felt like a very difficult life for me and having all of the chores and the hard work and the things that we had to do as kids, but it didn't. Because all of that was really offset by this sort of the freedom that we had growing up in and around nature. And I feel like I'm very blessed for those opportunities now where there's some very difficult things that I talk about in the book that I had to go through. And, you know, the survival. I mean, we were hunting or harvesting or gathering our food most of the time as children. And that was. Yeah, that. You know, there were at times that was tough. And I saw a lot of the things that. A lot of the hardships that my family members went through, my brothers. And ultimately I learned so much at such a young age, though, because of how and where I grew up. And for that, I wouldn't trade any of it, frankly. And I'm actually talking to you today. I'm at the hill. So I spent the majority of my life trying to escape this place. So when I was a little girl, I had no intention, no intention whatsoever of staying here on the hill. I didn't want to be here. I spent my whole life working to try to get out of here. And then ultimately 2020 comes around and it's bam. Where's the safest place in the world to be? I was like, okay, well, I guess the escape is now the hill. Your prison that you felt like you lived in at one point in your life is now the escape. So that's where I've kind of hunkered down and where I've been riding out the pandemic with my family. Now, that's not to say that I haven't traveled, because now we have farms in seven different states across the country. So we've. I've still had to continue to travel and do that, but I've been very. I've felt very blessed to still have this place.

It seems to me that. And I think this happens with every subsequent generation, some of the difficulties and poverty you grew up in shaped you and in a positive sense and enabled you to survive, to become tougher, et cetera, et cetera. What happens to your kids and my kids. Because your kids are not living off the land. Right.

So I think about that all the time. I think about it all the time. And, you know, so I have. I think all parents, we all have this desire that we want to step in when we see our kids struggling. There's this overwhelming desire to want to step in and just fix it. And there's so many things that I could just fix for my kids when things get tough for them. Right. And it's your natural instinct to want to do that. And so the toughest part for me in raising my two boys, William and Luke, as a single mom has been I want to fix everything for them. So the hardest thing is for me to like, really hold back from doing that. And I've actually had to. I think it's so important that we just don't make everything easy for our kids. I've actually had to create some hardship scenarios for them. So any hardship really that they've had to go through has been manufactured by me. Right. Because I'm like, what you're. That's too easy. You're gonna have to do it like this. Sometimes I make them, like, if they have a certain project and there's an easier way to do it, I don't let them do the. They take the easy path, whether it's mowing something with a push more versus a riding mower. So, yes, they could mow up closer to the buildings and stuff with the. Still with the riding more. But I'm like, no, use the push more. I want it done like that when I really don't care how it gets done. I just want them to actually have to work a little bit or if it's. I've really. I've tried to teach them that my children are very. They're very comfortable no matter where they are or where they go. They're going to a rural high school here in southern Illinois, but they would be just as comfortable. They're going to a public school. They would be just as comfortable in a private school. There's just as comfortable walking onto a nice, big, beautiful boat in the Bahamas as they are a john boat here in southern Illinois. And they treat people. They treat all people the same. And they're very kind humans. I feel like I've raised really good, kind humans who have a really good understanding of the world. And when I was a little girl, I mean, that was. They've been given a gift that I had to read about the world in a set of encyclopedias. I got to get out some. I remember staying up until like 2 o' clock in the morning, waiting, you know, Knowing that my dad was going to leave and go on this trip to Chicago to deliver hay or oats or whatever to the racetrack. And I would wait up for him, and sometimes he would take me, let me get in the truck with him, and go. I remember that feeling of wanting to get out. But these, my children now are being raised with under completely different circumstances. So, you know, they're like. They've been to more countries now than I had been to by the time I was 25, and, like, they were 10 years old, and they had already been to other countries and almost all 50 states now. And I've been taking them with me on business since they were very little. And, like, one of the things that I would do because I knew they. They did love to travel and they did love to go with me. I didn't really take them until they were old enough to understand you have to learn to pack your own bag. If you forget something, I'm not too bad. You forgot it. I'm not going to carry your bag. You have to be in charge of that. And if you cry on the airplane, you don't get to fly for, like, two years. So I was really kind of hard on them. They were like. They were tiny, like, dragging their suitcase to the airport. And then, like, I remember I felt really bad one time. I remember Luke, my youngest, his ears hurt really bad, and I could see him, and he's like. His eyes were getting a little glassy, but he was looking at me like, oh, gosh, don't let her see. Don't let her see. So I. I don't know. I think I've done a pretty good job with my voice.

As a very illustrative story about your youth versus what you just described. You have got to tell us the snapping turtle story and your father.

Okay, so about three weeks ago, I actually just saw, for the first time since that moment that I write about in the growing season, I saw a turtle that came close to being the size of that turtle. And it was crossing the highway between here and where my children go to school. And I was just like, oh, my gosh, there it is. That's the turtle. The turtle represents my first adrenaline rush, my first high. So what happened was we grew up, we lived off the land, right? So my brothers, they would go hunting and, you know, or they'd go frog gigging. And we pretty much hunted, harvested, killed, gathered, whatever, all of the food that we would consume. And I was on the way home with my father. I was riding in the pickup truck. With my father down this dusty gravel road, and there was this turtle in the middle of the road. And it was the biggest, nastiest looking creature that I had ever seen. And I stood up. I remember standing up. I was very small, but I stood up, pressed my face against the glass, and I'm looking out over the hood of the truck, the beast. I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's the biggest turtle ever. So my father pulls around the turtle. He pulls up in front of it, but then he stops the truck, and he looks at me and he says, get out and go put that turtle in the truck. And I'm like. I look back at him, I'm like, yeah, okay, all right. That's really funny. He's like, no, get out of the truck and go put the turtle in the truck. This is a snapping turtle. This is not. This is a snapping turtle the size of a garbage can. It's big, right? Okay, it's big. It's twice my size. And, you know, the head's this big around, the mouth's wide open like that. And I'm like, there's no way. And I remember in that moment, like, I would never challenge my father's authority. I was sort of his chief of staff. He would. He would say what needed to be done on the farm that day. I would go communicate those plans to all of my brothers. But it was like, you fell in line. Whatever dad said, that's what. That was it. And that was the first time I had ever challenged his authority, because I thought, are you crazy? I'm going to die things and take off my hand. But when it dawned on me that he was serious, I got out of the truck. And I remember looking at this thing and just being just. Just terrified, Absolutely terrified, gripped in fear. And I looked up at my dad, and he was looking down at me. And I did notice. I noticed there was a moment when he thought, this probably wasn't a good test. This was probably a bad idea to make her do this. But he had already dug in and told me, and we had already kind of had this back and forth. So instead of sort of leaning into that, where I saw, like, one of the many lines on his face move, where he was reconsidering that, making me put the turtle in the truck. The turtle started to pick up speed and go toward these weeds. And I didn't want to take the chance and think, okay, if I push back again, then he's going to tell me again to go get the turtle. And then I'm going to have to dig it out of the weeds. And right now, it's still on the road. So I closed my eyes as tight as I could. I took a deep breath, and I literally. Well, I closed my eyes. After I grabbed the tail, I literally swooped down. I grabbed this turtle. As soon as my hand hit that spine, the end of that spiny tail, and I gripped my little hand around it. I closed my eyes. And I just remember it was like all the adrenaline in my body to pick up, and it was like I hurled it into the air. Like, it was only in my hand for maybe three to four seconds. I mean, it happened so quickly. And I threw it, like, up in the air. Like, it could have landed on. Back on my head. You know what I mean? I hurled it toward the back of the truck, but the turtle could have went anywhere, right? And I closed my eyes, and I didn't open them until I heard this big thud in the back of the truck. And then my eyes popped open, and I thought, oh, my God, the turtle landed in the bed of the pickup truck. And then my heart was just, like, pounding, you know, And I was like, I just couldn't believe that I did it, you know? And then my eyes are big, and I'm looking at this. I'm like, oh, my God, I put the turtle in the truck. Like, that's gonna be dinner tonight. And then I thought. The first thing I thought was, oh, I can't wait to. To tell my brothers. Like, my brothers, I have a witness. My father saw me do this. They know that I grabbed that mean, nasty beast and threw it in the back of the truck. But I didn't want to see. I didn't want my father to see the satisfaction on my face after I got back in the truck. And I was careful to look out the side of, you know, the window away from him as we drove off. And we never said a word to each other as we drove off after I put that turtle in the truck. And. But I'll tell you, that experience, for me, I think I was. I don't know, I was like, seven years old, seven or eight years old. That experience, that was the first time I ever felt, like, a high, like an adrenaline rush. And then it was like, oh, I could be a junkie for this feeling. It was the feeling that you had after the fear, after you faced your fear. And so I actually think that moment, having gone through that turtle experience as a little girl probably is what helped me get through times later on. And even in my Adult life where I had to face my fear. And when I feel the fear and when I'd feel gripped by fear, I knew what that feeling was on the other side of fear. If I could just get there, if I could just do it, if I could just grab the turtle by the tail, I know how good this high is on the other side of overcoming fear.

I'm gonna go look for turtles for.

My kids to pick up now. Okay.

Speaking of overcoming fear, so at 15, you moved out of the main house, and at 16, you took over the farm. Walk me through that.

Yeah. So I was able to move out when I was 15. My parents, their relationship was kind of unraveling and it was just really unfortunate. And my four older brothers had really all left the farm by that, except for my brother Ted. So there's the five of us, and we're all exactly two years apart, and I'm the youngest. And so Ted and I were really the last kids left on the hill. And there was a small, really small, less than a thousand square foot little home that was on a 20 acre piece of property that we owned within like a mile, mile and a half of the hill. And it was just better for me to get away from everything. I wanted off at that hill so badly and I wanted to get on with my life. And I was clearly a very mature 15 year old. And so I moved into that house. And then When I turned 16, I was attending high school and college simultaneously. I was going to a little junior college and I would go to high school in the morning. And then I had a job that I was working at a little store called Tractor Supply. And. And then on top of that, I had the melon route that I had accompanied my mother on in the summers when I was a little girl that I had such incredible memories of. And having to go into grocery stores as a child, this tiny little person, like, and go find a manager and make a deal on how many cantaloupes or watermelons he wanted to buy that day. I had to overcome my fear of talking to grownups when I was a little girl and say, hey, let's make a deal. How many cantaloupes do you want to buy today? And then collecting the money for that, writing out the ticket, collecting the money. So I had a lot of sort of confidence built into me. Not just the exercises that my brothers and my father put me through growing up on this farm, but then also being able to get out in the summers on this melon route. And then my mom just Saying, hey, get out of the car and go in and ask, find out how many melons they want. Like, she didn't bat an eye or think twice about asking this little girl to go do this legwork. I'll be out back. Meet me out back with the shopping cart so we can put the melons in the cart and we can go. So it's not like I was just. I was a good student when I was in like grade school, but it wasn't like I was just this exceptionally bright student who just loved school, which is why I went to school and college simultaneously. Had nothing to do with that. Everything that I was doing at an early age was meant to get me out of rural poverty and off of this hill as fast as I could. So that's why I moved out at 15. That's why I attended high school and college simultaneously. That's why I negotiated with the teachers at my high school school to allow me to do that. That's why I leveraged the relationships that I had built when I was in grade school with the teacher, the really great, sweet teacher who I write about in the book, who basically covered for me when I was supposed to be in her classroom as a teacher's aide, helping with it with the kindergarten students when she knew that I was actually not going to be there, I was going to be at my third job, you know, So a lot of people along the way, that they knew that I was a good kid and they knew the insurmountable odds that I was up against. And a lot of people turned their head to let me be able to do things that probably normal 15 year olds would have never had the opportunity to do.

How is it that you are now the pumpkin queen of America?

Well, when I took over the farm, so everything that I was doing up until like age 17 really was meant to get me out of here and off of the farm for good. But then I had this moment where it was my responsibility to help sell off the rest of the assets on the farm because we were losing the farm to the bank and I was the last kid left at home, and I was the youngest and the only girl. So when I thought about the finality of leaving the hill and how there was this moment and I was walking the last horse off of the farm, I was selling the last horse that we had and putting it in a trailer. And it was at sunset on the hill, and I walked with a very heavy tread and I was looking around, I was breathing the air, I was taking in the view the scenery, and it was almost like everything turned golden in this moment. Guy. And I looked at the horse, the horse looked at me. I looked at the setting sun. I looked at the rolling hills, and it was like the light was just making this whole farm turn golden. And in that moment, I started to reflect on all of the childhood memories, all of the blood, all of the sweat, all of the tears that we had poured into that place that, you know, ultimately we were at risk of losing. And I felt like if I knew that if I left, there would never be anything for us to come home to and that someday when we were all 40, right? So I'm a teenage girl, and I'm thinking about 40. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Someday when we're all 40 years old, which is really old, you know, I was thinking, all right, this ancient. We will not be able to come back to this place and share memories and look at the pond. Say, oh, that was a pond. You know, I grew up swimming in that pond. And that's the back road, and that's the woods that we used to go play in and hunt in. And. And. And it seemed it just. The finality of. Of all of it devastated me in that moment. And then I realized this place that I had spent my entire childhood and youth preparing and planning to escape, which is why I did everything early, why I moved out, why I went to college. Everything that I was doing in my life was moving me out and moving me off of the hill. And then in that moment, in about the course of 30 seconds after I have the epiphany, I know I'm gonna stay, and I make this decision. And it was the timing, it was the moment. It was the lighting, it was the horse, it was the floods of memory. Like, it was just like. It was like a scene out of a movie. And I. You know, I was a teenage girl, and trust me, I wasn't. I was kind of. I mean, I was kind of a lot. You know, I kind of. When you're a teenager, you think. You kind of think you're the smartest person in the world anyway, right? And I was very headstrong, and I had my mind made up. But there was this one moment where I was this really enlightened human being for being a teenager. And that's when I made the decision that I was going to stay. And so when I took over the farm, like most entrepreneurs have to do, you have to figure out how to do more with less. And because it was a small farm, I knew That I would fail immediately had I decided to grow traditional row crops. I didn't have enough acreage to support hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment combines and tractors and the things that you would need. So I knew that I had to do more with less. And the way to do that on this particular farm was to grow fruits and vegetables because you could have higher yields. Your. Your yields per acre would be much higher. It's a higher value crop, and you could grow more dollar wise on less acres. And no one was growing fruits and vegetables in southern Illinois at the time. Everyone thought I lost my mind. They're like, okay, the fry girl completely lost it. I think the first year that I planted pumpkins, everybody made fun of me. They're like, look at all those. What's she gonna do with all those pumpkins? They had no idea, though, out of this rural community. Like, when I left in my truck, they didn't know that I had a market for everything that I was growing. And I had confidence. I already knew that I could sell. I'm like, I can sell anything. And I just, I need stuff to sell, though. So now I have to figure out how to actually grow it too. But that was. Pumpkins were the first crop that I grew on the family farm. They weren't the first crop that I sold because I started selling melons well before pumpkins. But they were really the crop that was the salvation for the family farm and my future. And so that's why I have such a special place in my heart. And I earned the nickname America's Pumpkin queen because now we sell more pumpkins than anyone else really, in the country, or maybe even the world. And I grow hundreds of different varieties of pumpkins. And most of the pumpkins that I'm actually the fondest of are pumpkins that don't even look like the traditional orange Jack o lantern. We sell millions of these traditional orange Jack O' lanterns. But I want people to know, like, pumpkin is so good for you. And we're the only country in the world that doesn't incorporate pumpkin into our diet nearly daily. So if you go to Australia, they're eating pumpkin as common and as often as we eat the potato here, and it's so much better for you. And so when I started learning about all of these different Italian pumpkins, French pumpkins, Australian pumpkins, Japanese pumpkins, and, you know, pumpkins grown in the island, I just, like, went pumpkin crazy and started growing all of these different varieties. And, you know, I'm like, no, no, eat your Pumpkin. Like, why are we just carving them up? We need to eat them too. They're so good. So I started growing hundreds of different varieties of pumpkins. And that's just really was the crop that as I built my business now we farm fruits and vegetables. Watermelons, cantaloupe, sweet corn, peppers, tomatoes. We farm lots of different commodities, but pumpkins are really like my pet crop. Even though it's actually. We're the biggest, but it's actually a small part of what we do. We actually sell more watermelons than we even do pumpkins. That's the crop that we became known for because it was the crop that I was most passionate about and my very first fruit and vegetable crop that I grew on my own.

So just to anchor the listener here, about how many pumpkins do you sell a year and how many watermelons?

Oh, my gosh, we sell millions now. Tens of millions. Like if you include all of the different kinds of little pumpkins. I mean, thousands of semi loads of watermelons and thousands of semi.

Tens of millions.

Yes. Go out every year. Thousands of semis leave our farms every year. And you know what's really interesting? So most of our business, all of our business really is direct to retail. So you would find our products at a Whole Foods, at a Walmart, at a Target, at a Kroger or Aldi, or even. Even a home goods store even now. It's funny, I used to be the. I used to be a cashier at Tractor Supply when I was 16 years old. That was one of the. It was like my first and only real job was being a cashier. It's the only time I've ever worked for anyone else in my whole entire life. I worked at Tractor Supply. And this year, it was the greatest thing. Someone from Colorado sent me a picture of a bin that we ship. It's a container, a cardboard container that we ship our pumpkins in. It had my face on the side. It said Sarah's Homegrown. And they took this photo and it was a bin of my pumpkins. And I didn't even know that we had started doing business with Tractor Supplies. It. So my sales team was like, selling to tsc. And it's my face. It says Sarah's Homegrown. And then there's the Tractor Supply store sign and logo in the background. I got so excited. Like, it went like. It made my heart. It just. It made my heart fill up. And Gaia was like, oh, my gosh. It so just came full circle. Having been that Cashier and that kid, you know, that was the only job that I had ever had. And then I showed up, like in their parking lot. 25, 30 years later, my face is on a pumpkin bin. So I'm like, yeah, I did that.

There is a God.

There's a God. There's totally a God.

Just to show you my total ignorance, now, my perception is that the pumpkin business lasts about a month.

Oh, no, it's an extended season. We'll ship pumpkins. Like, we'll, we'll ship. There's a. There's a condensed time period of about six weeks where it's really hot and heavy. But we actually start harvesting a lot of our stuff the end of August. So we'll like. So we grow those really cute little gourds and the miniature pumpkins and a lot of these ornamental type things that are used as ornamental and used as decoration. But everything that we grow is edible. We'll start harvesting in August, the end of August. And then so the way it sort of works is we'll start shipping those products to the northeast because in the cooler temperatures and then we usually end up down in the southeast and in Florida with grocery chains like Publix, which by the way, is one of my all time favorite grocery stores, they'll start building up a little because it's Florida, so it's, you know, it's warmer. So they get their products shipped to them a little closer to the holiday. But every year, pumpkin sales are extended well beyond Halloween. And it's the pumpkin sales for not, not the orange Jack o'. Lanterns. I mean, usually Halloween, okay, it's over. Nobody really wants that anymore. But those really beautiful heirloom varieties that we grow from seed source from around the world that people are actually start starting to do more with. And I tell you, 2020 has really been the year that people have connected with their food. And most people, you don't think about the food supply until it's threatened. And it was threatened. Our food supply was threatened this year. And when you start to see things, empty grocery shelves and things missing from your. Your favorite retailer, then you start to think about the who, the where, and the why, like who grew it, where is it grown, and why isn't it on the shelf? And so we have connected. And I think American farms and American farmers across the country have, and rightly so, had a light shine on them. Whereas their importance to the food supply is concerned. And most people don't realize that over 50% of our fresh produce that we consume in America and Then is sold, is imported it, and it's over 50% now of fresh produce. And I think that's been one of the things that we need to be more mindful of as well in understanding not everything has a season, so there are things that we can't grow in our country in the winter. So naturally we're going to import some things. But when consumers have a choice and when retailers have a choice between importing because the cost of labor is so much cheaper, or supporting American farmers who are held to higher labor wage standards, I think that because of what we've seen this year and the consumers newfound knowledge of where food comes from and who's growing it and how it's growing, I think that we're going to see a shift and I think that we're going to see more retailers supporting us grown when there's an option and when they have the choice to support grown in America. Because it became very obvious this year year how important the American farmer was. And hopefully we'll see consumers driving a lot of those retail decisions as well with their buying choices.

I have to admit that you are literally the only farmer I know or have ever spoken to. So can you give me that?

You were from Hawaii, you guys got some. You, you had to know somebody, okay.

But not on the scale that you do. So just for all the people who lived on both coasts who have no idea how American farming works, can you just fill in the blanks here? Is it conglomerates that own tens of thousands of acres or is it family plots or. I literally have no idea how farming works.

Depends on what kind of farming you're in. In traditional row crops, which would be like corn and soybeans, you need a minimum of about 2,500 to 3,000 acres a family 4 would need to farm that much just to make a decent living. And that's just maybe even above the poverty line. Really, that's how much you need to be able to produce enough income to support a family of four. So when you think in terms of these really small acre farms, like what I grew up on, it's the whole reason I got into producing fresh fruits and vegetables. Like I needed to know I needed to be able to do more with less. So we have grown into a national supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables. And we've purchased as farms and farmlands in multiple states, we've reinvested into, we always reinvest back into the land. And our business is still family farm centric and we are partnered with growers that operate on their own land, and then we market their crops for them, or we partner with growers to grow on land that we own and then buy that product back in a partnership with them. So there are a lot of different ways that our business works. And now we have thousands, thousands of acres. But that's not just one producer. That's sort of a multiple team effort. And I have four older brothers involved in that as well. But just basic agriculture. So there's grain production, then there's. There's fruit and vegetable production, fresh fruit and vegetable production, which, like what I'm in, the industry that I'm in, and I mean, there are different types of agribusinesses, but for the most part, it's a very difficult industry to be in because it's so high risk. And I talk about this in sort of the mentality of the farmer in the growing season. And this is. We're. It's like we're at Vegas all day long, every day. You know, we're putting money out there, we're taking risk. We're investing time, money, emotions, energies, and all of these things into these crops that frankly can get wiped out in any moment by a weather event. And I talk about the optimism of a farmer and how farmers have to have. Have very optimistic outlook, and you need to be able to walk away from a field that's been completely destroyed and be okay with watching all of your labor being lost, all of your money being lost, and to know that there will be another growing season, there will be a brighter season to come and to keep that hope. So there really is this. You have to have a passion, obviously, for. For the land and for doing it and for ultimately being a farmer, because no one really in their right mind would want to sign up for that. Like, yeah, sign me up for that. I want, you know, I want to watch. I want to watch my work get destroyed every five minutes, you know, so it's. It's not an industry I think of. People think of like factory farming. Like there are still small farms in America. And I think it's important. The preservation of these small family farms is key. It's very important. I've seen a lot of situations where people have lost their farms, and it's. It's very sad when that happens. But it's also the biggest part of what we do is, is managing risk, you know, and the risk that we take.

What's the average size of one of your pumpkin farmers farms, the average size.

Pumpkin field, because they don't all grow it's not contiguous. Right. So they don't. They all. They grow in different patches, literally. So a patch is usually anywhere between 40 and 200 acres in a patch and that's usually of one certain variety.

Another mystery to me about farming is why are some crops subsidized? Why isn't there a pumpkin subsidy but there's a soy.

I don't know. I think that's a good idea, Guy. I'm gonna get on that. Right? I need to get on.

What was the history of that? Why do we have some things that there's subsidies from the government?

Well, there are market fluctuations and then pricing and a lot of it had to do with imports and exports. And then there are a lot of safety nets too, built in for farmers, protections for growers in the event of weather disasters and such. The fruit and vegetable industry doesn't really have anything like that. So when I talk about high risk and high reward and doing more with less, that's why there is more of a barrier of entry into. Even though you don't have a lot of the really sophisticated or the really expensive machinery that you would need to start out with the combines and such, there's more risk, input risk because they don't have the same protections that many of the row crops have. And there's a big lobby with row crop production. There is private insurance in that industry that's heavily subsidized. And I think we'll probably get the get fruits and vegetables slowly transition to being a little bit safer. But they're always going to be a crop that's these. The crops that I'm growing. They're always going to be the kind of crops that require more and higher input cost up front. But the risk is higher. And the. But so is the reward. The potential for the reward is higher, especially if you have a market. But if you're going to. If you're going to lose a crop of a high dollar crop like melons or pumpkins or sweet corn or peppers or anything like that, you know, you. You have to make sure you're in that. You're in a pretty good frame of mind to do that because it's a lot different losing that than it is a crop of corn or soybeans. Okay.

I'm learning more about farming today than in my entire life. How the hell did you cut a deal with Walmart? Because I have gone to Bentonville and I have gone. I have gone into that building and I saw the sign that says 1 through 60 here and 61 through 120 there, and. And you're in room 93, and you go in that room and bada bing, bada bang, you're trying to get Walmart. So how did you pull that off?

Because, well, you see, guy, you went through the front door. I went through the back door. So I don't always go through the front door. You walk through the door.

Okay, so what was the back door?

Well, the back door was. I was very young, I was a teenager, and I was actually doing business at their store level with their store associates, selling melons directly to their stores before I ever started selling to their distribution centers or on a national scale. And I was able to learn their culture and that these people at Walmart were incredible people, but also ordinary. Like, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. And as that company was really building, taking off, and they were converting their Division 1 stores to super centers. So I had this unique opportunity because I was at a different level and I wasn't working with the corporate team. I was working with regular store associates, people just like me, and I was learning their culture. So by the time I had that opportunity and had the courage to literally show up without an appointment, open the door to that distribution center and start walking around like, hey, take me to your leader who's in charge here. It'd really be a lot easier if I could just bring my melons here to one place instead of having to stop at like 12 of your stores. I am only one woman. You had to have courage to be able to do that. And that courage came from many of the life experiences I had that led me up into that point where I had to not be afraid to talk to people and not be afraid to ask for what I wanted. And then there was a little bit of luck and magic in that as well. Because one of the great things about Walmart is they're such a diverse company, and diversity is nothing new for them. They didn't judge. The woman that I worked with wasn't really even that. I mean, she was older than me, but like, maybe her early 30s. They didn't. I didn't think about age, race, gender, none of that. It was, do you have the product? Can you deliver this? Very simple, straightforward, most straightforward company to ever do business with. And I loved it, right? I'm like this Midwestern girl, full of all this Midwestern moxie, and I'm just straightforward, let's make a deal. And I liked that way of doing business. So for me, I think the advantage was I had the courage. I had already learned Their culture. They were already sort of a customer. Not sort of. They were a customer of mine. And, you know, I had no fear.

I read in your book that you largely support seasonal workers and you need seasonal workers. But we're hearing from politicians that these people are coming and taking our jobs from our farmers and, you know, ruining the farm business.

Of course I support seasonal farm workers. I support a legal way for farmers to be able to access seasonal workers. There's this misconception, and I don't like it when people say, well, Americans, they just won't do these jobs. Because that's not true. Okay, so here's the deal. Think about where these crops are being grown. They're being grown. I'm not growing a field of pumpkins in a suburb of Chicago, outside of Chicago. I'm not in Lake Forest with a great big patch of pumpkins, right, where there's a population to support the harvest needs. I'm growing melons in southern Illinois in probably the largest district in voting district in Illinois with the least amount of population. Okay, so that's like where these things are taking place. Or they're taking place in Florida, down in Hendry county or down near La Belle, where you don't have a huge population to support your labor needs for a short seasonal time window. It's not that Americans won't do these jobs. It's that there simply aren't enough Americans in these very rural areas for very condensed periods of time to be able to adequately supply enough labor to harvest a crop in a short period of time. And then it wouldn't make sense for someone to move to a rural area. You know, like maybe 200 people decide to pack up their families and like, hey, I have a job. So they would come to the rural. Okay, well, yeah, you have a job, and you have a job for six weeks. That's why these jobs are seasonal in nature. So there is much work that needs to be done on allowing growers to access a legal guest workforce where. And there are solutions for, I think all farm workers, whether they come on a guest program or whether they're here and maybe they're undocumented and working in agriculture. There's a really easy solution to all of this. And if people would just do what I would tell them in Washington, we could fix all of this immigration stuff, at least for agriculture. I don't pretend to know everything, but we could definitely fix it for agriculture, and everybody would be happy. But getting them to listen, that's another thing. But there is a solution. And Ag needs a better solution. Because the solution that we have now to access a legal workforce is through the H2A program which is laden with bureaucratic inefficiencies. The program's been around for decades and that's the program that we work within. But we absolutely need farm workers in this country. We should absolutely respect the harvesters as much as we respect the farmers that grow our food. We should raise awareness around the job that they do and the hard work that they provide. Because I tell you what I mean, you walk in the grocery stores like someone picked that food for the most part by hand. And those hands were the hands of hard working either guest workers or immigrants that came here to do those jobs. And like I said, it's not the. That Americans won't do the jobs. There just aren't enough Americans in these areas and where these crops are grown for such short periods of time. And I think that any reasonable American can understand that and understand the need. And really, honestly, the fact that we're even having a conversation right now about fixing ag labor is so frustrating to me because it should have been done years ago. We can all agree on.

Is this because I have the fortune of talking to Sarah Frey, but if I were talking to other farmers, they would be telling, oh, no, erect the wall, keep those people out. They're taking jobs from Americans.

Has nothing to do. Has nothing to do with the wall. Has nothing to do with the wall. Yeah. And here's the thing. Agriculture is one of the most nonpartisan industries that we have in our country. It's really like when you think about, oh, I was asked recently, you know, does it matter if it's a Democrat or Repub, like, how does this affect you? You know, it doesn't really affect us that much, honestly. I mean, I have found that in my life and dealing with people on both sides of the aisle, that there's just, there's different. They treat each other differently in agriculture. Now, when you get to immigration and then you start talking about the things with immigration, Republicans seem to have one view on how they'd like to see things handled and Democrats have another view. But let me tell you this. This. Republicans are very guilty, but so are Democrats. So one of the arguments that I made when I was arguing for comprehensive immigration reform and then arguing for. I testified in front of Congress on the guest worker program. My analogy, I had met with members from both sides of the aisle, both Democrats and Republicans, and I had Democrat members say, you know what, everything that you said made absolute sense. But if we give. If we reach a conclusion on this issue with ag, then we lose the issue. That's a problem for me. And I'm like, okay, well, you lose the issue. How do you lose the issue? Well, if we don't have ag, then we won't get these other five things on immigration that we want. So they hold Ag hostage because they want a bigger plant. And then on the Republican side of that, they're like, oh, no, we get it, because these are our constituents in these rural areas that need. So we want to fix that. So there is a natural desire on the side of the Republican Party to fix it. But then there's also a natural desire on the side of the Democratic Party, like, no, no, no, don't give them an inch. Because if we fix that for them, that's all they really care about. And then we have all of these other people that we have to deal with. So AG gets caught in the middle, agriculture gets caught in the middle of this fight. And the way that I explained, it's like, oh, okay, if there's a school bus and it's like half over the cliff, right? And you're all these kids on there and it's like teetering over the cliff, do you stand back and say, I don't really know if it would be fair if I would go. I know that I can't save all the kids on the bus. I could probably save half of them or 70% of them. I could get them off. But is that really going to be fair to the other kids? So now you know what? I'm just, Yep, can't take any kids off the bus. That's how I feel. This, this challenge has been. Has been approached, and it's that everyone can really agree on a solution. In my opinion, it's not that hard. There's really some common sense ways to fix this for both the undocumented workers who are here in our country and creating a viable guest worker program that. That possibly people could enroll in and then have the option to return to their home country legally and then come back? I mean, think about some of these people who are here. Wouldn't it be nice if they could become documented as a guest worker and be able to go back to their home country, see their family, and feel free and freely travel back in with the proper documentation and not have to look over their shoulder every five minutes? I would. The solution is not that difficult, but it just becomes this issue in agriculture specifically, where the issue is the hostage issue and nobody wants to say the only, like, some are part of this population. My argument is it's a very big, important part of the population and I'd rather save as many kids as I could possibly save.

Let's suppose that the next predator president calls you up and says, sarah, I want you to be Secretary of Agriculture. Would you do it? And if you would do it, what would you do first?

I would do it. I would do it and I would use my platform to fix labor and agriculture because that's one of the biggest issues that I have that I'm most passionate about. I've been a farm worker. I've done those jobs. I do everything. And in fact, I still go out there and I still, still work and I still get my hands dirty. And I don't do it because I have to anymore. I do it because I still have a love of it. Do I get to do it every day? No. Do I do it like three or four times every summer just to go out there and sweat and feel it and be like, yeah, those are some of the best night's sleep that I ever get. I don't know that it would matter who the president would be. I would serve and that I would serve because I would do it for my industry and I would champion and I would advocate and I think that I would do a good job.

I would feel better with you as Secretary of Agriculture than, let's say, the current occupants.

But, well, I might not last long either, guy. You never know. I mean, I kind of got a mouth on me, so I don't.

I would make the case that at that level you should have that attitude that I'm just going to do the best job I can. And if I don't get reelected or I don't get reappointed or I don't get what, whatever, so be it. It's not like you're a management trainee at Goldman Sachs and you're worried about your first job. This is. You have something to fall back on at this point and quickly. So you've had a very interesting life. I think you have a lot of business lessons that you've figured out, and I would just like to tap on some of that business wisdom, from rescuing your farm to becoming the pumpkin queen, to facing these kinds of seasonal worker issues. In particular, if a young girl is listening to this and says, I learned so much from Sarah, what would you like her to learn?

It's really actually quite simple. Don't be afraid to steal thunder. One of the biggest gifts that I was given as A little girl is. I had the support, really, of my four older brothers. They taught me so much, and I had to keep up. I was the youngest. I was the girl, and. But they cheered me on, and they never made things easy for me. But they did go to great lengths to help build my confidence. And they. They pushed me out front to steal thunder, and they didn't care. You know, like, when I. When I caught that fish for the first time, I didn't know that I didn't actually catch the catfish. I didn't know that they'd put it on my line, and the thing nearly drowned me and took me down under the water. When I was, like, pulling it out, I thought, I caught that fish. No, they set that moment up for me where when they handed me the pole, they knew they had the fish tied to the end of the string and that it was going to be my. It was going to be my win. And then when I got out, when I finally got the fish onto the bank, I was like, see, I'm the greatest fisherman ever. You can never leave me at the house again. You have to take me fishing with you every time you go. And I'm the best there ever was, you know, and they had to sit there and listen to me run my mouth and clearly know that they say, like, set it up or this. This little kid. Is this their little s. Sisters? I'm the best there ever was. See, I'm so great. And, you know, they let me steal thunder. And then, you know, that confidence spread competence later on in life. And I think one of the hardest things for women to do is to talk about their accomplishments and to feel, you know, confident, encouraged. And when a man says, sometimes, oh, I did this and I did that, and people like, oh, yeah, he did. He did. But when a woman says, I can do this or I can do that, and I did do that, you know, it's kind of like, oh, well, she's kind of full of herself, you know, And I think we sort of need to get over that. Where especially really women judging other women at times, too. Women need to be able to go out and talk about their accomplishments and talk about the things that they can do and the things that they will do without apology. And they need to accept that, you know, like, don't be afraid to step on somebody's toes and don't be afraid to be right. So many times they're kind of like, oh, well, you know what? That's really my idea. But I want to make it their idea. I mean, I spend so much of my time making my ideas, other people's ideas, but sometimes you just have to get to it and just steal the thunder and say, hey, this is how it is. And that's why I dedicated the book the Growing Season to the girls that steal thunder and the boys that help them do it. And if there's any lesson that I really want young women to take away is that they can find their courage even in the darkest of times. And they can be any, anything that they want to be. And they just have to believe and they have to work hard. And no matter how hard things get, look for the good and know that there's a brighter growing season to come and never give up.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with Sarah Fry, Pumpkin Queen of America. I learned more about farming in this interview than the previous 66 years of my life life. Sarah has a very interesting story of bootstrapping her way out of poverty to become a very successful farmer. I hope that you will take her lessons to heart and you will see that there is always hope and there is always a way to succeed. Speaking of success, my thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C. Who have helped me make this podcast a success. Remember, remember, wash your hands, stay away from crowds, wear a mask, and listen to Tony Fauci and Vivek Murthy. Aloha and mahalo. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable the Paper Tablet Company. This is remarkable people.