By Joe Kertzman, managing editor, Badger Common’Tater
Growing vegetables in the rich, muck soil of Southeastern Wisconsin seems like an ideal way to spend one’s career, but it is not without its challenges.
Corey Kincaid, president of Dean Kincaid, Inc., farms the same land that his grandfather, Dean, purchased in 1950, but the story starts earlier than that.
Dean and his father, R.E. Kincaid, grew onions in Grant, Michigan, for a few years before selling the land. Dean went to Florida and raised onions there for a year, but he had difficulty controlling diseases due to the humidity and limited fungicidal materials.
That’s when, in 1950, he returned to the Midwest looking for land to drain. He found what he was looking for in Palmyra, Wisconsin. Over the years, he slowly expanded the farm with the help of his sons, Gary (Corey’s father), and John, to make the farm what it is today.
Dean Kincaid, Inc. specializes in growing onions and red potatoes in Jefferson, Waukesha and Walworth Counties.
Are you still farming 6,000 acres, and how much of it is in fresh market potatoes and onions? We are now down to just under 2,500 tilled acres.
Nine-hundred-and-forty-five acres went to solar and 1,760 of the muck went back to the Department of Natural Resources and is currently being converted into a wetland.
We have been trying to diversify our farm over the years to make it last well into the future. I tried growing other crops, like organics, beets, shallots, pearl onions, and canning carrots, and none of them really panned out or made much of an impact. So, we as a family decided to diversify in other ways.
We have a portion of the farm that is in solar that came online last month and have also gotten into apartment and office development projects, mostly in the Milwaukee metropolitan area.
It is nice having some assets with a roof on them and not having to worry quite so much about impacts from the weather.
