Gage and Sarah Werner turned a garden on a ‘funny strip of land’ into Werner Creek Farm

Gage and Sarah Werner never meant to run a farm business. In 2008 they built a house on about nine acres a few miles north of Winfield, on ground that had been in Gage’s family for generations, and planted a garden. Eighteen years later that garden supplies a year-round store in downtown Winfield, a commercial kitchen and, this time of year, a stack of holiday pie orders.

The land sits near where Timber Creek meets Cedar Creek. Trees surround it and the bridges in are narrow, which is part of why nobody was farming it. “It’s kind of a funny little strip of land to use for commodity crops,” Sarah told Kansas Living magazine earlier this year. As Gage put it, once equipment got big enough, a nine-acre patch of grass wasn’t worth the trouble.

The creek bottom turned out to be good vegetable ground, though. After a few years the Werners had more produce than they could eat or put up, so they took it to farmers markets. People kept buying.

From market table to Main Street

Werner Creek Farm now has a storefront near Sixth and Main, next to Ladybird Brewing. Sarah says about 80% of the produce sold there is grown by the Werners, with other area growers filling in, especially in spring. Sweet corn comes from someone else. Gage has given up on it: the timber around the farm means raccoons and deer get it first, every time.

The bigger change came in 2022, when they added a commercial kitchen on the farm. That’s where the jams, jellies, salsa, pasta sauce, breads and soups come from, along with take-and-bake dishes like lasagna, chicken pot pie, bierocks and sausage kolaches. The shop also carries Kansas products the Werners don’t make, like popcorn and cheese.

The kitchen has changed what they plant. Tomatoes go into salsa and sauce as fast as they ripen, so they’re always short. Onions are worse. “We can’t grow enough onions to keep up with just what we need in our kitchen with salsa and our take and bakes,” Sarah said.

Gage thinks the appeal is less about being local than about short ingredient lists. “Our breads don’t keep very long because the ingredients are flour, salt and water,” he said. They also try to keep pesticide and herbicide use low. That saves money, and it’s the food their own kids eat.

Two jobs each

Gage is a former teacher and runs the farm day to day, from crops to staff. Sarah keeps the books and helps in the kitchen. She’s also CEO of the Winfield Chamber of Commerce. Their children, Bruce and Willa, help when school allows.

The farm has spread to satellite plots and covers about 15 acres in all. High tunnels let it grow through the winter. At the summer peak up to eight people work there, mostly high school and college students. Two kitchen workers stay on year-round. Work in the high tunnels starts early because by about 10 a.m. in summer it’s too hot to be inside one.

Gage keeps it interesting with a new crop experiment each year. A recent one was watermelon. The crop was good, he said, but he couldn’t always tell which melons were ripe.

Weather still decides a lot. One spring a late frost killed about 300 tomato plants he’d set out early. That year turned out to be so good for tomatoes that he was glad, by the end of summer, to have lost them. Another year he ran drip irrigation across the whole place and then it rained all summer. Some of the lines were never turned on.

No real off-season

The Werners joined Shop Kansas Farms soon after it started in spring 2020. Sarah says its traveling Market of Farms events, which she describes as a statewide farmers market, have brought in new customers, especially the one in Andover. They have also met other producers there whose products now sit on their shelves.

As for slowing down, Gage says it never really happens. The only break comes after the last holiday pies go out. “It’s kind of like the seasons, always changing,” he said. “By the time you get tired of doing one thing, it’s time to focus on the next.”