Janzen Family Farms

Janzen Family Farms is managed by Norm Oeding, our farm operator, in collaboration with Leroy Hiebert, who has worked at the farm for more than fifty years. Various Janzen family members help with accounting, marketing, web design, building, and general odds and ends.

Norm came to work with us in summer 2007, after having farmed organically nearby for more than 10 years. He is known for “Norm’s Flour” and his home farm “Spring Creek Ranch,” as well as bread baked with "Norm's Flour" and sold under the “Little Red Hen Bakery” label. Norm is the one planting, harvesting, feeding cattle and doing other day-to-day operations, including selling at farmers markets. He takes a lead role in the decision-making process on the farm and lives in the Janzen farmhouse.

Janzen family members – four siblings, their four spouses, and their 11 children and grandchildren – continue to play a role on the farm in various capacities. Some, such as the little grandchildren, join in for special occasions.

For around thirty years until his recent retirement from farming, Mark Janzen Sr. worked the farm, and he and his wife Hennie lived in the Janzen farmhouse. Today, John Janzen, Mark Sr.'s oldest brother, and his wife Reinhild continue to live down the road from the farmhouse where Norm lives now. Our forebears began farming in Kansas in 1880, and our family has been in the Newton area for five generations. Janzen Family Farms is a name we adopted in the 1980s.

If you'd like to read more about the history of our farm, and the people behind it, please refer to the "History" section on our website. More about our transitions can be found in the "Media & News" section.

We congratulate Norm Oeding for receiving the 2011 Friends of Education Award of Excellence for School Volunteer, presented at the annual meeting of the Confidence in Kansas Public Education Task Force, an advocacy agency that has been in existence for 30 years. The initial nomination was made by the Newton Alternative High School in recognition of a donation of flour. The students used the flour to make bierocks which were sold to raise funds for an educational trip to Colorado. This nomination was endorsed by the Newton School District (# 373), and enhanced to include Norm's work with the agricultural magnet program of the Walton School. This included hosting student visits to the farm, and donating JFF beef for school festivities. To read the full award citation, click here.

JFF Receives “Century Farm” Award

In September 2009, the Kansas Farm Bureau conferred “Century Farm” status on Janzen Family Farms. “Century Farms” are farms that are members of the Farm Bureau, that have been owned within one family for more than a century (with the present owner related to the original owner), and that retain at least 80 acres of the original Kansas farmland. As our farm has been in Janzen hands since 1898, we fit the bill.

John and Reinhild Janzen were at the Kansas State Fair Sept. 18, 2009, to receive the award. Marci Penner, Executive Director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, and U.S. Representative Jerry Moran were on hand to celebrate the moment. (It so happens that Moran represents part of our farm, given that it lays on the county line that also happens to be the dividing line between Congressional districts!)