Work and Pray: The Trabbic Family Pumpkin Farm | Unleashed

October 22, 2021

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Summary

“When people come here they realize that we are Christian — in fact they realize that we are Catholic — just by the different things that are present on the farm,” says Deacon Ken Trabbic of how he and his family witness to their faith on the Trabbic Family Pumpkin Farm. In Marker 9.3 (Witness) of the Unleash The Gospel Pastoral Letter, Archbishop Vigneron writes, “Our goal is to extend the kingdom of God on earth by making the world a place where Christ is known and loved, so that as many people as possible are brought with us to eternal life.” That’s exactly what Dcn. Ken and his family do as they welcome visitors to their farm each fall. May we be inspired by their witness!

Transcript

The harvest is very important to us as farmers, but for all of us. As a family, we come together to celebrate the goodness that God has given us through the fields and that is the crops that are brought in at this time of the year in the fall. So this is God’s plan and we are hoping to do his will through this by extending the faith through everything you see out here.

My name is Deacon Ken Trabbic from Erie, Michigan and this is our farm. The farm itself has been in the family for over a hundred years. We farm about 900 acres, 33 acres of that is pumpkins. We plant to each seed by hand when it goes into the ground and we pray as we do that asking God’s blessing upon it. When you come to the farm, you’re able to come and just enjoy yourself. We have cider and donuts that we make here on the farm and homemade pie, so a straw maze, a corn maze. One other item we have is the hayride, where you can bounce onto a wagon, get to ride out into the field and get the opportunity to select and pick your own pumpkin.

When people come here, they realize that we are Christian. In fact, they realize that we were Catholic just by the different things that are present on the farm. We have statuary around that indicates saints that we pray to for intercession on our behalf to help us to continue to stand for the light of Jesus Christ. We have pumpkin’s that we’ve inscribed Bible sayings on it, we say pray to end abortion. Our prayer life, our tradition and our faith has been instilled in us from the very beginning. You will see the divine mercy is available to people inside the store. My wife makes scapulars and rosaries and it’s given to people who want to be able to go back to the rosary and ask for our Blessed Mother to help guide us to her son.

Then we have on our fence, “Jesus, I trust in you,” and we do trust in Jesus for our crops that we put in 10% is up to us. We’ll plant the crops, but 90% depends upon God and we put our faith in him. And whatever we get, that’s what we were supposed to get for this year. Some years are challenging and other years seem to be a very good blessing. We put it together and God has been very gracious to us. Our hope for people who come to the farm when they leave, as a family, we hope that they will go away with a peace and joy that they’ve not seen before and that when they go back home, they’ll feel refreshed and renewed. We live our faith every day of our lives. I am so grateful to God that he has allowed me to be a farmer. Because of that, I show that in all that we do and my family does the same and we are grateful.