Pizza on the Farm

Hawkins Family Farm is known for its livestock, vegetables and grains.

While all of those things are common farm offerings, the North Manchester farm is also known for something that’s not so common.

Visit the farm on a Friday evening in the summer and pizza is among its offerings, too.

Hawkins Family Farm has been making and selling pizzas on Friday nights for the last 10 summers. Jeff Hawkins, who runs the farm as one of its partners, has dubbed the event “Fridays on the Farm.”

But how did a farm get the idea to become a pizzeria?

Hawkins says selling pizzas was his solution to generating funds for a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization he started. Following a 23-year run as a Lutheran pastor, Hawkins created Hands On Pastoral Education using Clergy-Sustaining Agriculture – or HOPE CSA, for short.

“It’s a program, basically, that tries to encourage pastors who are kind of pressured to be CEOs of organizations to resist that and continue to be shepherds of flocks,” he explains. “So, we bring them on the farm to deal with real flocks … in order to kind of keep reinforcing that dimension of their pastoral identity.”

The majority of Hawkins’ time as a pastor was spent in North Manchester, where he served for 16 years. During that time, he noted many parallels between that job and his side job as a farmer.

“Lived out here and did this kind of work and really observed that the work that I do out here on the farm with these flocks and the work that I did in town with that flock, there was just a lot of overlap,” he remarks. “It’s about the same thing. It’s about health and well-being.”

While Hawkins was running HOPE CSA and considering ways to boost its funding, his son, Zach, had a problem of his own. A baker, he wanted to make the perfect sourdough bread – but didn’t have a means of doing so.

“Sourdough bread bakers think the best way to do that is a brick oven,” notes Jeff Hawkins.

As he considered he and his son’s quandaries together, Hawkins had an epiphany.

“And finally, it clicked with me that, well, maybe if we had an oven on the farm that it could serve the purpose of being a fundraiser for the not-for-profit,” he shares.

Upon discovering a farm in Wisconsin that made and sold pizzas, Hawkins started to envision a similar operation on his farm, with the brick oven churning out delicious, doughy rounds topped with meat and vegetables from his farm. After opening a dialogue with the Wisconsin farm about its pizza enterprise, Hawkins was sold. The brick oven would be built.

While several people helped construct the oven, Hawkins credits a friend who did masonry work for years with leading the project.

The finished oven was large. In fact, in order to get it heated up to the 800 degrees necessary to bake pizzas, Hawkins says the firing process must start long before Friday.

“It takes us two days to properly fire the oven so that it’s hot on a Friday,” he shares. “It’s not like you can go out, flip on a switch and do it. We have to start tending the oven Thursday morning so we can have pizzas Friday night.”

And firing the oven isn’t the only bit of prep work.

“We have to make the dough the day before,” says Hawkins, “so it can proof overnight.”

“It’s a real enterprise,” he adds. “To do two hours on a Friday night takes two days at a time.”

Hawkins says he and Zach, who also helps run the farm as a partner, pride themselves on either producing, or locally sourcing, many of the ingredients for the pizzas. Pepperoni and sausage come from his farm, says Hawkins, as does basil and the wheat for the dough, which they have milled into flour by Carthage Mill, in Carthage. Also, tomato sauce for the pizzas is often made using tomatoes from his farm, says Hawkins.

Hawkins Family Farm does business with a number of restaurants, selling them meat, vegetables and more. As a result, the farm has built relationships with the chefs at those restaurants – and it’s those chefs who supervise the farm’s oven on Friday nights.

“Generally, some of the higher end, better restaurants, where the chefs are used to taking things and creating amazing stuff, they love to come here,” says Hawkins. “Every week, we have a guest chef from a different restaurant that we work with.”

Hawkins says four, 10-inch pizzas are offered every Friday. Of those four, three are the Hawkins Farm pepperoni, Hawkins Farm sausage and Hawkins Farm margherita, which features tomato, mozzarella, parmesan and basil.

The fourth pizza is an original creation by that evening’s guest chef.

“They create some of the most unusual pizzas that are always stunning,” remarks Hawkins.

“It’s always like, ‘Wow. That’s amazing,’” he adds. “It generally is our best seller, the guest chef pizzas.”

This summer, for the first time ever, the farm will have beverages to accompany the pizzas. For the 21-and-over crowd, beer from local breweries will be available for purchase every Friday, says Hawkins. In addition to chefs, Hawkins Family Farm has established relationships with brewers, Hawkins says. For example, Junk Ditch Brewing Company, in Fort Wayne, he notes, makes an India pale ale that’s brewed with Hawkins oats.

Hawkins Family Farm is located at 10373N-300E, North Manchester. The latest season of Fridays on the Farm will start May 24 and run through Aug. 30. The only Fridays where the farm won’t be open are June 14 and July 5. The event runs from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. each time.

Attendees have the option of eating their pizza on the farm or ordering it to go. Those who elect to dine at the farm should bring their own napkins and utensils, along with chairs or picnic blankets, says Hawkins, as none of those items will be provided by the farm. Also, while the farm will be serving beer this season, non-alcoholic beverages will not be available, so attendees should be mindful to bring those as well. When finished eating, the farm requests that visitors remove all of their refuse and dispose of it at their homes.

Cash, checks and credit cards are all acceptable forms of payment, with all proceeds going toward HOPE CSA.

Beyond funding his nonprofit, Hawkins says his favorite thing about Fridays on the Farm is that it brings people to the farm, where they have a meal that’s made with many ingredients from the farm that surrounds them.

“It’s a little fascinating how even farmers are removed from eaters these days to some degree,” muses Hawkins. “We really have a goal to lessen that gap.

“We don’t farm in the abstract. It’s food for people.”

This story first appeared in The Huntington County TAB.