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Taste of Abby: Loren Taves Has Aaron Try Pumpkin Cider!
In this episode of Taste of Abby, Aaron sits down with Loren Taves from Taves Family Farm to explore his family's rich farming legacy, his transition from engineering to full-time farming, and their commitment to giving guests lifelong memories through innovative sustainability practices, agritourism, and unique experiences like cider tastings and pumpkin patches.
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Welcome to Taste of Abbey. I'm Aaron Peet from Chihuahua First Nation and I host the Bigger Than Me podcast. In this series, we'll explore Canada's largest farming community, connect you with local farmers, creators and restaurant owners. We'll dive into how they harvest from the land, strive towards sustainability and strengthen the social fabric of our region. Join me as we deepen our connection to these lands and explore the taste of Abbey. It's an honour to be with you today. I'm wondering if we could first start with an introduction.
Loren Taves:My name is Lauren Taves. I'm a farmer here at Taves Family Farm.
Aaron Pete:Would you mind telling us where we are sitting right now?
Loren Taves:Right now we're in the south end of our property at the cidery. I'm enjoying some hard cider here in the lounge area.
Aaron Pete:I am fascinated by this idea within my culture, of seven generations, which means we look back seven generations and we look forward seven generations.
Loren Taves:Interesting.
Aaron Pete:What I love about your story is you're a third generation farmer. Would you mind taking us to the very beginning and your grandfather buying the plot of land?
Loren Taves:Yeah, actually, technically it was my dad that purchased the land. They were on here. My grandfather well, we call them Opa, we come from a Germanic background he had a farm just a one kilometer from here that my dad grew up on so very close by.
Aaron Pete:Interesting.
Loren Taves:Yeah, but he was. He came from, actually, where there's war right now. He came from the Ukraine area, he was. They were called the Mennonites. They were a Dutch-German mix of people and they farmed in colonies. And he had a very large farm, he told us, and it was all taken away by the communists and they ran for his life, took everything. He had nothing in his pockets, all he had was his clothing and he ran into Canada, came to Canada, how does that story impact you, when you learn about that and you go through some of that history?
Loren Taves:You know, it makes me think about being responsible towards governance in Canada that we don't move in the same direction as what happened in other nations that went that route.
Aaron Pete:And then your dad starts the farm.
Loren Taves:Can you?
Aaron Pete:tell us about that period, what you took away, oh that's interesting story, because that was when I was born.
Loren Taves:I don't know if you saw, but later we can look. There's a timeline of pictures on the farm. And this farm here was all stump land. It had been cleared for forestry back in the turn of the last century and then the farms were bought up. Actually, a lot of the farms were given to World War I veterans coming home. They were given farms and lands that they sold off to the immigrants that came in, which were the Dutch Mennonites Right.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, and so how did he go about starting the farm and what were you taking away from that as a kid?
Loren Taves:I have very early memories of when I was probably two or three years old, my dad stopping the car over there on the road, opening up like a barbed wire gate and seeing stumps and tall grass everywhere. There was nothing here but grass and stumps and stumps really big stumps, like you know, four or five foot in diameter Stumps. That my memories were. My dad using dynamite and drilling holes in the base of the stumps and blowing them up so that we could collect them and, just you know, get rid of them, burn them out and things like that. And then my dad started farming the land that he cleared.
Aaron Pete:Okay, yeah, what did he start making?
Loren Taves:Raspberries, okay, and cattle. We had raspberries and cattle.
Aaron Pete:Interesting, and during that period I find it interesting because work ethic seems to be passed down in a really unique way from my perspective. With farms Like you take a lot away from just the hours people are putting in, the times they're waking up, the schedule they keep their dedication. Is that something you picked up on as well?
Loren Taves:Yeah, I did, and I have to say maybe the last few years I've slowed down a little bit, just being that I'm learning to pace myself. My early years, though, I remember working until two or three in the morning, trying to stay ahead of the weather and crop keeping protection on crops and things like that.
Aaron Pete:Did you always know you wanted to go into farming? Did you see that and go like? This is for me no.
Loren Taves:I was going to go into engineering. I did. I have three years towards an engineering degree at Simon Fraser University.
Aaron Pete:Okay, what made you choose not to go down that path?
Loren Taves:I went through a bit of a change in my life at that time. I came home for a little bit, some things happened and I decided to take a year off. I had been already farming in the summer. My dad had allowed my brother and I to use an acre of land here just to make money for paying for our tuitions and stuff, and then you got into it and interested.
Loren Taves:Yeah, and well we were. We started, yeah, we got really excited about planting gooseberries and currants and then apples in 1989. I graduated from high school in 85 and then, yeah, so then we started planting apples. Next thing you knew, we thought it was summer work, but it wasn't. We weren't really thinking, so I ended up working longer and all of a sudden I just ended up working and I kept postponing going back and next thing you know, I was expanding the operation and building and putting more orchards in and managing other people's orchards and bought a farm across the street where there's a greenhouse here and bought another farm down the street. And next thing, you know, I never I didn't look back anymore, I just kept on farming.
Aaron Pete:Right, there are some interesting things. You mentioned gooseberries. Where did that come from for you, where you're like that? That's something I'd like to learn about.
Loren Taves:I remember one day there was a man down our street. He was a dutch, um, it was kind of like a. He did a lot of trading, like he brought stuff from holland to to our area. He started bell peppers one of the first bell pepper growers out here and he came to our door, knocked on the door, says hey, you know, I'm bringing plants in. I'm bringing these gooseberry plants in from Holland and would you like to put some in and we'll market them for you?
Loren Taves:Had a packing shed down the road here and we looked my brother and I was right around the time we were like, well, why not? And he says we can get a guarantee you so and so many dollars per pound. And we said, good, this is how many pounds they make, and gave it the math. Of course never doesn't always work out, but we ended up planting these and then we learned how to grow them because there was a lot of disease attack and that we did not. We're not told about, right, but that's the farming blood, and how to tackle that disease and how to make sure we could harvest a crop every year was a lot of work that's actually one thing I'd like to ask about.
Aaron Pete:In school you start to learn how problem solve, but it's so natural out here that you face a problem. You got to find a solution. It's kind of that ebb and flow process. Would you mind sharing kind of how that's helped you develop?
Loren Taves:You know it's a. There's an academic side to farming and there's also an art in farming and there's a feel for things as well, and that's where the art side of it comes in. But the academic side is you look at your crop, you research it to some degree, you talk to others, but every location has its own subclimate. So our climate here is inside what's called the Southwest Marine, but if you go two kilometers that way, it's outside that climate. So this climate right on the south end of Gladman Road is a very unique climate. If I go, let's say, during wintertime we'll get drifts of snow here, and you go a couple kilometers that way and there's nothing and the wind and the temperatures vary. So every it's like a topographical map. You look on it and we're inside this area where we have to treat it differently than I would if I was a couple of kilometers from here.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. Yeah, I find that fascinating. But what I also really like about the work that you do is that you're really connected to the earth, and you kind of talked about how you kind of continue to be involved in the process and kind of grow it. When did you fall in love with the process and the connection? You have a deep respect for sustainability and food waste. When did that start to become a priority?
Loren Taves:I think all farmers in that sense small scale farmers I consider myself small scale compared to the massive corporate farm operations you would have around the world, different places. But if you are generationally thinking, then you start thinking about. You never stop thinking about retiring, although lately I've thought a little bit about it. You don't think about retiring, you just think about sustaining, being able to plant crops in the future and you don't really think when you're younger, that there's an end to it all. You just keep realizing you have to roll into something, you have to keep that land active and alive and producing and you have to find there's an economic balance in decisions that you make on the land as well. There's the altruistic. There's ways of looking at it that are puritistic. Then there's also looking away from the practical, pragmatic side of things and farmers find that place in the middle that makes sense.
Aaron Pete:The challenge we see is with those large corporate farms is they don't always seem to be sustainable, if at all sustainable. It depends.
Loren Taves:I mean, some of them, I think, have that in their DNA and they actually will market that in the in the marketplace like, let's say, very large organic operations. Have that in their DNA. Not all do. And it's also a changing landscape as well. The farming of the past that came out of World War II, you know, with all the different. I remember one chemical called diazonon and guthion. These were all chemicals the Nazis used on people in these concentration camps. They were testing them on them, you know, as ways of eradication of people, and they used those then later on for eradication of insects. So that's where the first generation of commercial farming started, where one guy, instead of being able to control 50 acres, could control 5,000 because he could just wipe his pests out with one spray. So then the scale of farming increased. And then there is also it comes to a point of you know where there's economies of scale and you know you can only put so much in and you start running out of ideas. And what we did, though? Because technically we're a small farm I farm about 60 acres. We have five acres of green housing, four and a half acres of hydroponic greenhousing. It's a small operation compared to a lot of them Poultry we have here. We've got the orchards and when I looked at it I realized that we're really too small to be long-term sustainable. Because every time you see everybody start planting blueberries, next thing you know you go from 1,000 acres of blueberries to 15,000 acres of blueberries. You kind of go and then they're planting more and more and you kind of go. You know there's a there's a point of no return right. There's a point where you'll be producing too much, which happened the last couple of years. Now guys are going why am I growing these things anymore? There's no price left on them. Supply and demand. So we decided to.
Loren Taves:In order to create a sustainable farming model, we combined both commodity farming, which is a poultry, and our greenhousing, which is a little bit. We have specialty greenhousing, but there's still some commodity. We compete with Mexico with our peppers and eggplant and things, but then we also do value-added. We have a toast right. This is taking our apples and our berries and our pumpkins, which is in that one, and we will make it into a product that has higher value. So what you do then is you have a certain amount of acres and you realize I've got to get more per acre or I need to get out and do something else. So that's where the value added, that's where the agritourism. You can come here, enjoy a day, take a hayride around the farm, pick apples, buy the apples from our store, buy the cider. Value added. We're adding value to everything we're doing and that's been the story of our farm in the last 34 years.
Aaron Pete:Yes, I wanted to ask about that when did that start to become an idea that you were like we're going to open this up to the community? Because now more than ever, it feels like people have been disconnected from where their food comes from. But there seems to be this deep desire in people to want to reconnect with where their food comes from, how it's grown and learn about that, and you've started this long before that trend started to take place, where people were really, really passionate about getting back to that that's true.
Loren Taves:Traditionally, when you had public and farmers meet together on land, it's been pick your own operations. Now they've been around forever, right? People come out, a farmer says, hey, I've got berries here. I'm opening up, you can come pick berries and we just weigh it and you can pay for it. And then they just don't, they don't have to pick it themselves, which is the highest cost. And then they sell it for a certain price. Well, we took it one step further. Yeah, and then they sell it for a certain price. Well, we took it one step further. We said, well, if you're gonna come pick apples, we also want to give you an experience.
Loren Taves:And I went to a marketing program years ago it was back in 95 and the 95 96 and I remember they said you don't sell produce, you sell experiences. And it never left my head. I thought, yeah, I don't, I can sell apples, but what I wouldn't mind is selling this experience, because this is really good cider and I'm experiencing the flavor and the goats are here enjoying it with me. You know, it's a beautiful breeze here. It's a nice place to sit and visit. That's the experience, and I realized very, very early in my career that that was what I needed to focus on was the experience.
Aaron Pete:I would take it one step further and not just an experience. I think you also sell memories, because so many people look back on these moments in their life Like I remember going to a corn maze as a kid. Like those are the standout moments. You don't remember that time you got a B on a test when you're eight years old. Like you remember these moments with your family where they're having a good time and everyone's connected in a meaningful way.
Loren Taves:Think about it in your life. I remember my vacations with my folks. I don't remember the day-to-day very much because that's the mundane side of life. The magical side of life was actually going on a trip with them to California, whatever it was when we went. So I have firm memories, very crystalline memories of my youth and those are because I had great experiences and so that is actually yeah, you're right, we're selling memories. Yeah, you sell an experience. You also sell a memory we have. Second, I almost believe we're getting close to third generation people coming here already, where we saw school tours with little kids this big that now are having children and bringing their children. So that's to me it's like a feather in your cap in a sense. You kind of look like. Really, when you look back that way, it seems like time is flying. It wasn't that long ago, but it was. It was 34, it was our 35th year of opening the farm to the public, yeah, and it feels like it's gone by tremendously fast.
Aaron Pete:I agree, and you can just hear it. You can hear the animals, you can hear people laughing, kids playing. That's just such a wholesome place for people to be able to come reliably every year and say it's fall or it's the season Like we're ready to come and enjoy.
Loren Taves:Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were amongst a few people, a few farms in the very beginning that started really focusing on this. I think Alder Acres was there and ourselves and Alf Kraus Kraus Berry Farms. We were really the original of these three farms. I think Laity started really pushing it in Next Generation. Some other farms have come on and they've done a very good job, but I think you've seen a collection of very passionate farmers with really good ideas and very entrepreneurial and they've come up with incredible experiences for people all around. So we support all the local farms that have gone the route of offering experiences.
Aaron Pete:You have these drinks. Could you tell us about these the mocktails, the cocktails, Sure.
Loren Taves:Yeah, so the one you have there that took a lot of work. That's called Charlie's Pumpkin and we name all of our ciders after animals on the farm here. And Charlie is you probably didn't see, he was down in Farm Hill. He's this massive big pig and he loves having his back scratched and he just grunts and walks up to you and rolls over and you know he's almost like a dog. But we, if you look at the bottle, which I don't have here, but it's got a picture of Charlie rolling a pumpkin trying to make cider out of it. It's on the bottle label.
Loren Taves:But what we did is we took a pumpkin called the Cinderella. A Cinderella pumpkin is an heirloom pumpkin and they're kind of like a kind of little squat pumpkin. They looked like that pumpkin in the Disney Cinderella that they turned into like a carriage. It's that kind of like weird shape. They kind of have them on the Lord of the Rings too. I saw them, the Tolkien novel thing they had that they're kind of carrying these bright auburn red, you know, pumpkins. And we took that pumpkin which has an incredible flavor and we cut it up and we were able to find a way to get that flavor to steep into that cider. We tried a number of different ways. It didn't work, but there was finally one way a lot of experimenting done with our cider maker, kelsey, and who's also the one we talked about featuring in the SAR, the Search and Rescue team and we were able she was able to get that flavor and it's just been really good. Fantastic. And I was really surprised because a lot of people don't like some. Tons of people love pumpkin obviously you, starbucks, and everybody has the pumpkin lattes. Some people don't like pumpkin, but people who don't like pumpkin actually end up liking this one. We've noticed that I like pumpkin. Try it out and they go huh, actually that's really good, right. So, yeah, this is the hit. And which one are you drinking? I'm drinking Nanny's Nicest, okay, so it's a little bit lower alcohol. I think that one's about 6.5%. This is 5% and it's basically it's a bit of a sweeter.
Loren Taves:What people find when they come and drink hard cider is, you have to understand, hard cider is not apple juice with vodka added right. It's not. That's not what it is. So if you just ferment apples, just fermented straight, and you drink that dried out, there's no sugar left. It's fermented to say, six or seven percent. It's gonna have a little bit of a Dry kind of puckery taste and a little salt sulfates and they a little bit of sulfates in there, a little bit of an interesting.
Loren Taves:You know, some people don't like it. A lot of people do. It depends what your flavor. But there's some people that ask us oh, we still want. Just, I want to feel like I'm biting into an apple, I want an apple flavor. So, kelsey, and that actually is very difficult to do with, unless you're adding what you see on the market for cheap cider they just take apple juice, they take vodka or spirits, they add it to and they I'm not going to say the names of it, but almost everything cheap on the shelf. It's all it is. It's not real cider. Right, this is the real thing. So it took a lot of work. I'm going to be quite honest with you. We tried it last year and it failed. Okay, it worked this year. Right, this year we made no new ciders. Last year we focused on this one and it actually failed, but we don't stop. So we went back at it again and we said we got to make this one taste like you're biting into an apple, and this one does.
Aaron Pete:And what is?
Loren Taves:Nanny. Who is Nanny? Nanny's the well, nanny, there's a billy goat, there's a nanny goat. Okay, so the nannies were the sweeter, like biting into an apple, everything sugar and spice and everything. Nice, right, and that's what nanny is. And our Billy? We have one called Billy's Best. We made that back in 2020. And that one's a bit more of a stronger Billy goat. You know rough Billy goats. They have the big horns and they're rough.
Loren Taves:That's cider. So we have two ciders. We have nanny and Billy. They're both apple cider. They're have two ciders. We have Nanny and Billy. They're both apple cider. They're both made from apple, but they both have uniquely different flavors. It all has to do with the technique involved and that's the artisan approach to what we're doing. It's craft. It took a lot to make this. Like I said, this was probably our most expensive cider, for the failures that came into it. Wow, and it was the one that tastes more like an apple. That's the weirdest thing. Without going and taking apple juice and just pouring it in. We don't do it. We do it properly, like you do as a cider maker. Cider master.
Aaron Pete:What is the biggest standout piece that you would want people to know about the process of making the cider that they probably don't know?
Loren Taves:Huh, interesting Process. You know, anybody can ferment apple juice. In fact, take a jug of apple juice, put it out on your shelf outside and warm and act for a while. Just let it sit there. It'll start fermenting on its own Actually, that's called apple jack and it'll actually pick up wild yeasts that are inside the atmosphere there's yeast flying around us right now, you know and it'll pick up whatever yeasts are in the area and it'll ferment a certain specific flavor, make an apple cider so it's consistently the same.
Loren Taves:You have to control the process. You have to take a special yeast, you have to feed it properly, you have to destroy the wild yeasts that are there, otherwise you get a contamination in the flavor complex. You have to have good equipment. Equipment. Cleaning is probably 2 thirds of cider making. It's cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, making sure that your stainless steel and everything there's not one spot where there's contamination could come into your cider and then, if you can continue to do that, you'll actually end up with having very consistent, very good, clean tasting ciders. Ciders, that kind of taste like sometimes they call it barnyard, they call it weird smells like rotten eggs kind of thing comes through it. That's when you get an off cider and it'll happen. It could even happen to us. We're very careful.
Aaron Pete:You ready to try it? I am, I guess you know, cheers, cheers Thank you.
Loren Taves:To Nanny and to Charlie.
Aaron Pete:That's so smooth.
Loren Taves:Yeah, I had one of those earlier. That's why I didn't do Charlie, because I wanted to try Nanny again. Right, right.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, it's so light. Do you think people underestimate that? Because often wine gets like a white wine gets compared to a light drink?
Loren Taves:I always thought about where cider sits on the spectrum of spirits not spirits but alcoholic beverages. To me it's kind of like a halfway between beer and wine. You know it sits inside that Venn diagram here's your beer lovers and here's your wine lovers, and then there's your cider in the middle there, and I think cider kind of it's fruit. So basically it's a fermented fruit, whereas beer is obviously it's a fermented grains. So you're not going to get some of those you know hoppy flavors or those. I love beer too, like a good stout, you're not going to. But cider has its own unique place in it. So yeah, you get people that do. Come here for the light, refreshing flavor of a good cider and enjoy the farm at the same time.
Aaron Pete:Can you tell us about the work you're doing with the Search and Rescue team and bringing about ciders?
Loren Taves:Well, I don't do any work with Search and Rescue, just to be quite honest. But Soul Is About.
Loren Taves:I think three years ago it was now our cider maker, uh, kelsey. She'd been working for the farm since 2010 I think it was, and we used to do farmers markets and she was our administrator in the farmers markets and she got sick and tired of the early saturday morning getting up four in the morning and going to the markets. I said, oh, let's do something more sustainable as far as so, what we ended up doing was starting up a cidery. What was your question? Again Wondering?
Aaron Pete:about how they all got started, because she joined the search and rescue, and then you come up with this idea, so coming to.
Loren Taves:Yeah, I'm trying to filter into Kelsey's story here. So Kelsey started making cidery but she was always one who loved hiking and climbing mountains and she always was showing the latest mountain she climbed. Every weekend she tried to climb another mountain and then she discovered that she wanted to be part of the search and rescue because it was like outdoorsy and moving around in your backpacks and you're getting, you're in the, you're in very. She loves being in very uncomfortable places, like in the snow and the rain, and I was like you know, I want to go to bed, um, but she's out there like at night rescuing people and things like, but um, I'm.
Loren Taves:We were looking at something to tie together Kelsey's endeavors and something to do with helping the community, and at one point I wanted to have what was called a community press. That was where the ideas came from. Why did everybody bring their apples from their trees? Because we had so many people would come here. They'd bring their apples in buckets and old boxes and say, can you press my apples for me, because they all fell in my backyard and we have customers every year doing that. And so we built that up where we do custom pressing because we have a press.
Aaron Pete:Right.
Loren Taves:So at one point I says you know why don't we do a search and rescue? Because all these apples are being rescued and you're in search and rescue. We need to call this search and rescue. So we call it SAR Cider, although we gave it a name Tux's Treasure, because we wanted to have one of the barnyard or one of the farm animals in the picture, part of it. And Tux has been here since the beginning of the cidery. So we thought let's just put Tux into the whole thing there.
Loren Taves:And Kelsey said yep, she was thumbs up towards that and we contacted their team. So hey, you know we want to do is add we want to donate a lot of our proceeds from this to the search and rescue. Now people can also bring apples and we'll give them a little reward for that and you know they get an extra cider from it and they can be part of this community endeavor because almost everybody that works here, except for one person, is all voluntary. So it's a community. It's a community endeavor that we wanted to be a part of right so, and that's where search and rescue came from.
Loren Taves:So one thing with search and rescue was is that it incorporates apples that people bring like anything, so the flavor is actually going to change every year on it because, it's that process you can't actually nail down, which is part of the interesting part about it.
Loren Taves:Yeah, the only thing is that will be always familiar in the flavor is we do a blackberry vanilla, and I think that's what we're going to end up doing is always end up having some sort of a blackberry vanilla element to it. And there's one more thing to say the reason why we chose blackberries is because one of the things that Church and Rescue people hate and they deal with all the time is the wild blackberries. You ever seen them on the side of the road, the wild blackberries? Oh my gosh, they're invasive right they're invasive People get caught in them.
Loren Taves:You're trying to search for people and you're trying to work your way through blackberries. So we went out last year for this one and we went and picked a whole bunch of wild blackberries just to make it somewhat authentic and off the farms we had some areas and then we added some of those wild blackberries to us. We have some of that in there.
Aaron Pete:That's so cool because the idea brings together food sustainability, making sure that you utilize things and they don't just go to waste, giving back to the community, but also people having the opportunity to get involved in a unique way that you don't really consider in everyday life, and also because it fit with Kelsey, our cider maker, fit with her life. Yeah.
Loren Taves:And I felt that it was something that would tie something even for her, like her passions, and because a lot of making cider has to do with passion, has to do with, you know, when you created a really good cider like this one and you taste it and you finally end up and you made a large batch and it was consistent. There is a lot of pride in that.
Aaron Pete:And my understanding with Search and Rescue is they don't get a lot of funding to do the work that they're doing. It's mostly volunteer, and so you're putting your life on the line, and they don't always at least in Chilliwack from my understanding they don't always have the gear that they need, and so this is going to an important cause. People get into some hairy situations.
Loren Taves:Yeah, From my understanding, this is going to their fund, which is for purchasing equipment much needed equipment for them.
Aaron Pete:Fantastic. Can you tell us about how people can get involved with that, yeah, we've got.
Loren Taves:If you check our websites, you check our Instagrams, we actually have where you can sign up to bring in fruit and we will receive it and we'll recognize you and you'll actually have a voucher for some cider later on. And also some of what you're giving is going to go to when we sell it here or sell it even in the marketplace. A percentage is going back to search and rescue.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, that's fantastic.
Loren Taves:I think it's 20%, if I remember correctly.
Aaron Pete:Fantastic and they can buy them here. Is there anywhere else they can buy the cider?
Loren Taves:Yeah, search and rescue is going to be offered. We haven't actually sold any because it hasn't gone. It's being listed this week, right, but it's going to be in the general marketplace, so that'll be listed on the website where you can find our cider. But we do supply a lot of our cider to places like Barney Merchant and places like that.
Aaron Pete:My last question is what's the next generation of Taves Farm going to look like?
Loren Taves:I don't know.
Aaron Pete:That's an interesting question, right.
Loren Taves:We actually don't know right now.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. Do you have a vision where you want to take this over the don't know? That's an interesting question, right? We actually don't know right now. Interesting do you have a vision where you want to take this over the next couple of years?
Loren Taves:I think this next year one of our visions is actually to um, uh, create our a more sustainable operation sustaining not in the sense in the agricultural side, but in the um. There's a lot of change happening in society, with getting workers being able to offer competitive wages for supervisors, trying to hone our operation to more efficiency and that seems to be the direction that we're going in for this coming year is to try and create a better environment. We're actually becoming more not that we haven't been, but more focused on workers and more focused on the community inside the farm and, like we've developed a way, more health and safety policies. We did a 250-page document this year that we came up with on health and safety, which, when my dad and I ran this place health and safety, what it's like, we're on the tractor, no seatbelts I ran this I didn't have employees here until like 2005. I hired people part-time here and there, but I worked my butt off all the time. Health and safety Now, all of a sudden, like, yeah, we have health and safety meetings, we have, oh, there's something. So everything is all about governance policies, making sure that we can follow through so people can enjoy working here. And one thing we know that our staff work extremely hard and trying to find a respite for them or trying to find that they find that this place, they call this place home and we do.
Loren Taves:We've got people like I said. Kelsey's worked here. She got her degree and I thought I think was back in 2015 or 16. She got her degree in Sciences. And I said, oh, it's your last year working here. And she looked at me. I said well, why would you want to continue working here? Because I, honestly, you're just going to go now, because now you have your degree.
Aaron Pete:She said no she stayed on.
Loren Taves:I was like surprised, but not because I think we offered a good. I always wanted our staff to feel like they're family and we have always done. I've always done that, at least personally.
Aaron Pete:Beautiful. And when people are looking for things to do this fall, what can they expect when they come visit the farm? Oh fun.
Loren Taves:Yeah, yeah, Every year, yeah, we always try. This year was more trying to make more interesting little things around the farm, Like little visuals that we created. This year there was more of the finer points, Like last year we invested in. There's a place called Imagination Corporation in Yarrow. Yes, my son used to work there. Actually he's an art. Actually he works in Dubai. Right, he has his own studio in Dubai.
Loren Taves:But he, these guys, they make all these really cool. They make them out of concrete, but they're you can see them around the farm here. They're beautiful signs or figurines that look like. They're sort of like a Disney vibe to them. But they're not Disney, but they're that same vibe and we've been investing in those things so that people find little magical moments all over the farm. So those things are so expensive. You just buy five of them. You spend 50 grand, Like it's a boom, but they're beautiful and they do something for you and I. We want to keep investing in little things to keep the farm, Because I mean, the farm is only so big I can only I'm not going to buy more land or anything farm a better place, but we focusing more and more on the human resources side of it and that seems to be where a lot of our focus is right now.
Aaron Pete:So when people come they can expect corn mazes, uh, trying cider, yeah any other things that they can do while they're here um, let's just say well, the hay rides, yeah, everybody, a lot of people come for the hay rides, like you said.
Loren Taves:The corn mazes right right now we've got the the at the magical garden. The magical garden right now is the sunflower garden, which we'll walk through later on. It's beautiful and, um, and what else can they do here? There's farmville down there where there's a bunch of different animals. Uh, we have a miniature cow we bought last year daisy daisy's a lot of fun. And uh, we've got marley, the, uh, alpaca and what else? We had a lot of baby goats this year we had 14 of them running around here, so I can see a couple of them over there grazing, and some new things that we have here other than that. Like, well, three corn mazes, right, yeah.
Aaron Pete:That's fantastic.
Loren Taves:And there's also, oh, cinderella's on the pumpkin patch. We put her carriage out there. It's a beautiful giant, like life-size white carriage where it's in the pumpkin patch.
Aaron Pete:Brilliant well, thank you so much for doing this. I can't wait to do a walk around, and thank you all for tuning in to Taste of Abbey.
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