November 2 – Cackleberry Farms, located in Minco, comes from a multi-generational farm that has evolved over the years to meet the needs and desires of the family.
Jennifer Phillips said her grandfather, J.C. Phillips, purchased the family farm “a long time ago” and the family has continued to live there ever since, with Jennifer raising her four children on the land. Her grandfather and father worked in the wheat and cotton fields until they both died. Over the years, the family farm has evolved into what Cackleberry Farm is today.
Cackleberry Farms leans more toward a homestead-style farm, where they grow their own produce, make baked goods, and a variety of other homestead qualities.
“We are largely self-sufficient,” she says. “But we do like the teaching type. So anyone who wants to listen or wants to learn, likes to teach.”
And if there’s one thing Phillips knows a lot about, it’s food and baking. In addition to the knowledge she gained from the family farm, she worked in the commercial grain industry from the age of 16 to the age of 30.
Phillips tried to open a small farm store in Minco in 2018, but said she was somewhat ahead of the farm-to-table movement. The city was not ready for a farm shop at the time.
So she stopped paying rent on a building in town and focused on selling home-baked goods with her daughters at farmers markets, including her famous cinnamon rolls.
“My girls and I have been baking from scratch since 2018. We are best known for our cinnamon rolls,” she says.
Phillips said she is often asked if the cinnamon recipe is her grandmother’s, since she started baking with her grandmother around age 5. It’s not, it’s Phillips’ own recipe that she has adapted over the years, jokingly adding that her grandmother’s cinnamon rolls “were very dry.”
She said she uses fresh eggs and Oklahoma wheat flour in many of her recipes, meaning she uses the wheat her family and neighbors grow to make her flour.
Phillips runs the Oklahoma Farm to Table Facebook page and is active in the community across the state. While they sell many of their goods – including hot pepper sauces – Phillips says they also sell products at Lakeview Market in Yukon, near Lake Overhosler. The market is a nonprofit agricultural market center that focuses on purchasing from small farms across the state to help “bridge” the gap between organic local farms and households, according to its website.
Cackleberry Farms and Phillips may have been a little ahead of the trend in 2018, but thankfully farm-to-table style stores are becoming increasingly popular. It’s growing so well that Phillips is helping to open a small store in Minco in the coming weeks with 7 Mile Processing and Cattle Co., a meat processing plant in Minco.
“They’re getting ready to open a meat market here in town,” Phillips said. “… And that will be more than just a meat market. It will try to bridge the gap between not having a supermarket in town and people having to go out of town to do a lot of shopping.”
The store, which will be located on Highway 81, will follow the Homemade Food Freedom Act and offer products such as cheeses, other dairy products, meats, baked goods, canned goods, eggs and other foods.
“We’re going to try to fix our food desert here a little bit,” she said.
For more information about Cackleberry Farms, check them out on Facebook.
