Five Star Farm attracts a crowd for Easter event

Craig Bakay | Apr 04, 2018

Five Star Farms on Scanlan Road have only been hosting public events (one in the spring and one in the fall) for a couple of years but already they’ve become a go-to destination. And their Easter Family Fun Day this year was no exception.

“I brought 400 frozen perogies as well as fresh and cookies and I was sold out by 1 p.m.,” said Barb McLeod of Barb’s Perogies.

Other vendors reported similar results. Conboy’s Maple Syrup ran out of candy and Perry Family Farms went through 9 ½ dozen donuts and 40 packages of butter tarts.

“This is fantastic,” said Tracy Parker, farmer-in-charge of the day. “It was crazier this morning and we even had some lineups but everybody was having fun.”

Parker and her partner Curtis Moore own the farm and operate it with their five kids. She refers to it as a homestead but it’s a working farm in just about all respects.

Although most farms don’t invite the public in a couple of times a year.

“I really think there’s just not enough opportunity for kids to just get out and see animals,” Parker said. “We love to teach and hang out with kids.”

To that end, they have lots of animals on the farm, and all of them are specially selected/bred to be able to handle lots of attention.

“We’re not a petting zoo,” she said. “We have a wonderful group of regular volunteers now who get to know the animals and help visitors get to know them as well.”

She said it’s important to have animals that don’t get stressed around large groups of people, and safer for the kids too.

“For the chicks, we have an incubator in our bedroom and they’re handled from birth,” she said. “We can’t take in rescue animals because we’re not sure how they’d react and that’s not good for the animal or the visitors.”

And then there are the born hams — critters who just seem to take to the whole thing naturally.

Take Felina, a miniature horse.

“She’s our rock star,” Parker said. “She likes getting attention so much that she’s taken to rolling in burr bushes and then coming to us to get them taken off — primarily for the attention.”

Parker said that it’s important to them to maintain the feel of a traditional farm but also to ensure a pleasant experience for guests.

“We have to bridge the gap between the true dirty farm to what the urban expectation of what a farm is,” she said. “It has to be safe.”

Buoyed by the success of her ‘events,’ Parker said they’re planning to be more full-time, especially in the summer and are currently in the planning stages of various workshops and such. They’ve also done some renovations in the loft area of the barn and plan to make it available for various meetings and functions and probably the odd barn dance.