When the city of Kent, in northeast Ohio’s Portage County, restricted access to his farm market which was within the city boundaries, he ran for and won a seat on city council. He is still on the council.
When an irate neighbor in the housing development just across from his farm acreage made an anonymous telephone complaint three years ago about the scarecrow cannon he was using, Kamburoff tracked the man down and suggested he go to council with his complaint where Kamburoff abstained from voting. A large delegation of other neighbors showed up to back Kamburoff, whose market they had patronized for many years, and the matter was amicably settled, since the market's use had been designated long before development began.
“It was almost overkill with the parade of neighbors who wanted to testify in my behalf,” said Kamburoff.
It took two years to get a new market built at its current location because of city residential zoning criteria. Kamburoff applied to the county auditor to have the farm designated as an agricultural district, the only one in the city of Kent.
Kamburoff and his wife Julia now have a modern market that sells farm-raised produce, as well as lawn and garden supplies, feed and pet needs, Christmas trees, pumpkins, tomatoes, mulch and topsoil, making the market into a year round operation.
That’s a far cry from the days when a much younger Kamburoff started selling sweet corn from a table in the backyard in 1955, 12 years after his parents had purchased a 72-acre farm in what was then a quiet rural location. Later they built an 8 by12 foot stand with a roof, a predecessor to the current location, but still in the same general area. Kamburoff was renting 450 acres for grain farming plus doing some general construction, when the last rented acreage was sold for development in l988, forcing the Kamburoffs to concentrate on the farm market.
They had married in 1981, after Julia gave up her job at a local radio station to care for Kamburoff’s daughters, Susan and Mary, now 26 and 23, and help with the farm business.
Kamburoff decided to give up sweet corn production last year and try his hand at more entertainment farming. Although this was a major part of market income, the occasional noise complaint still came in, and other more important factors came into play. Every urbanized area in Ohio and Pennsylvania, or any state where large wooded acreage still remains, has become a haven for deer. The blackbirds are also a menace to grain crops. But most important of all was the lack of labor, as easier part-time jobs at fast food emporiums became attractive for high school students.
After attending the l999 meeting of the Ohio Direct Marketing Association, he was inspired to build a maze, which opened in mid- September.
“I filled up several pages of notes, and talked to everybody I could about mazes,” he said. Now he has volunteered to tell about his experiences in future educational meetings, since “no one learned more in the past year about building mazes than I did.”
He had decided that sudan grass was better than corn for maze purposes, and easier to lay out and clear a path in the construction. He gives full credit to Delaware County Extension Agent Rob Leeds, who led the panel at the 1999 educational meeting, and will do so again for the national meeting this year, with Kamburoff as an eager participant.
To create the maze, Kamburoff placed the design on graph paper from a bookstore to follow with the mower during the layout process. He’s incorporated a pumpkin field between the maze and an observation tour, which ends with the ground inscription of Kent, Ohio, and also incorporates the logo for Kent State University. He’s constructed two smaller sunflower mazes for school tour groups, and is considering a petting zoo.
Only pumpkins and Indian corn were raised this year. The former produce acreage is in soybeans, as the trend to outside attractions plus retail resale is completed.
Four 30 x l00-foot greenhouses are used for spring bedding sales production and also produce vegetable seed plants for retail. The sales year finishes with Christmas trees.
The Kamburoffs are fairly certain the trend to urbanization will not be stopped, and are preparing an estate plan with this in mind. Neither daughter has expressed desire to continue the business. Under Ohio law, they are paying $ l0,000 a year for property taxes. This amount would be 10 times that without the ag use exemption. At present 83 cents of every property tax dollar in their district goes for school purposes and will not be lowered.
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