About Our Farm
Yarnick's Farm is where advanced, innovative farming techniques meet good old fashioned farm know-how to create the highest quality, best tasting vegetables and beef available anywhere! Dan has adapted some fairly high tech farming methods which allow Yarnick's Farm to have vine ripened tomatoes 10 months out of the year and the earliest, freshest, sweetest corn a full month before other area farms. Click photos to enlarge.
In The Greenhouses
Yarnick's Farm is well known for their true, vine-ripened tomatoes that "taste like a tomato should taste." They grow their tomatoes, and other vegetables like cucumbers, eggplant, bib lettuce and hot peppers, hydroponically. Hydroponic means that they are grown without soil in a nutrient-rich water solution in a controlled environment.
The plants are grown from seeds in the starter greenhouse and "graduate" to the hydroponic greenhouse as seedlings. Seedlings are planted in a sterile rock wool made from melted igneous rock. A computer-controlled system provides water and a changing formula of nutrients to the plants through small plastic tubes. Each plant is pruned to a single leader that is trained to grow up and down a string and can grow to as much as 40 feet in length!
These vegetables are carefully picked by hand at their peak of perfection and either sold next door at the farm market, or shipped out to one of the roughly 30 grocery stores between Indiana and Pittsburgh that buy from Yarnick's Farm. You can't find fresher produce than what is waiting for you at Yarnick's Farm market, even if you grow it yourself!
In The Fields
Yarnick's Farm also grows many vegetables in the real soil of the many fields surrounding the greenhouses and farm market. Dan employs many advanced farming techniques that help him get his vegetable crops ready sooner than the other area farms. When most people are just planting, Yarnick's Farm is already picking!
In the first picture, Dan is looking at sweet corn growing under plastic blankets. His corn is already "knee high" a full month ahead of most farms. In the second picture, corn growing without blankets, in another field on the same day, is only just starting to grow!
In the third picture, it is July 1st and the corn is ready to pick! The field without blankets will be ready in about a month. So, using some high tech help allows us to get two seasons of fresh sweet corn in one longer season!
We grow alot more than just corn in our fields. During the season our fields are full of leaf lettuce, cabbage, zucchini and candy onions.
Our grain fed Black Angus cattle are nearby on another part of our farm. Our cows are happy cows because we feed them well. Everything we feed them is grown right on our farm, so we know exactly what they are getting!
Here is Dan with one of his John Deeres. You can usually find him kicking up some dust in the field!
Below is a field covered with a blanket. That's not snow!