Market Forces: Corner-Copia

This week, Patch spoke with John Specca, owner of the Corner-Copia Farm Market and Garden Center in East Windsor, who discussed farm life and his foray into “agra-entertainment,” a.k.a., his corn maze. Corner-Copia’s busy stand and corn-laden tables are located in the corner of the market lot adjacent to De Forest Avenue and Beechwood Road.

Would you describe your business?  

I started it as a farm stand and now we have evolved into a nursery-garden center-farm market. The current site that we sit on is 87 acres. My father-in-law’s property makes it 100-some acres. My wife and I both grew up on farms–our fathers were farmers. It’s a family-owned farm. We started it in 1992.

The farm stand is selling food from my father-in-law’s and my farms; mostly mine. I just don’t have the acres to do the sweet corn. So he does that on his property and we do all the other stuff here. For the farm operation, the garden center, and the road stand, I have 7 employees, including my wife.

We’ve diversified. We do a lot of mums, pumpkins, sweet corn, tomatoes, all that kind of stuff. For the garden we do annual bedding plants, and we’re going to try to produce our own shrubbery. We do three farmer’s markets: in Scotch Plains, Summit, and the Trenton Farmer’s Market.  

What’s your background?

I was born in Mt. Holly. My father had a farm down in Mt. Holly, we grew mostly vegetables. After I got out of high school, before I went to college I was involved with a lot of outdoor markets down in Philadelphia. I was elected president of that association. It was for tailgate markets—there were six, in different church parking lots. I went to college in the mid-'80s and I was majoring in economics, and when I got out of college, I started working at the Trenton Farmer’s Market and selling my father’s wares, that’s where I met my wife. Her parents had a stand at the Trenton Farmer’s Market for eternity; her grandfather was one of the people that started it. After we met there, I moved to Hightstown, and that’s when I found the spot that we called Corner-Copia. It’s in a huge office research area. All around us are these huge office buildings. But it’s a nice 100-acre piece. That’s when we started selling our produce, and we got a well big enough so we could irrigate everything, and then we started bedding our own plants. We do most of our growing here.

Tell me about your corn maze.

This is our fourth year with the corn maze. Corner of Chaos, that’s what we call our mazes. On our Web site (www.cornerofchaos.com)–that photo is an actual photo of the field. It was cut by a company out of Idaho called Maze Play. I sent them the measurements of our field, and they suggested different patterns they could do. They drove out here and cut the maze, designed it and helped me get it set up as far as the signage, and I just have to keep it watered and cut. It’s really a good marriage. We had always cut our own—this is the first year we did it this intense. It’s very high-tech.

We plant the corn in June, and they cut the maze in July. Then the corn still can mature. The maze is 3.2 miles long so you’ll be in there a little while. There are twelve stations, and when you do them all you get a free pumpkin. And that’s just the family fun maze. We also do a haunted maze, because part of our property is 40 acres of woods, so we made two big walking trails through the woods. We’re running them on weekends starting Sept. 26 and through October and November. The family fun maze is $10 for children 5 and up–infants up to age 4, it’s free. 

Do you feel it’s necessary to have other side businesses along with selling produce to survive as a farmer?

For me I thought it was, because of the cost of property. We rent our land, and the piece we’re on is probably $9 million, which I’ll never be able to buy. If I ever have a chance of thinking about a piece of property of this size, I’ve got to come up with a different way besides selling tomatoes. In other places you can still make it selling produce. But where we are…

I would like to own land; to be able to own my own farm would be great. I like being outside. It’s something I’ve grown up with and always been around. We’re trying to sign a 10-year lease and at least have an option to buy on this property we’re on now. With agra-entertainment, agra-tourism, and the garden center, hopefully I can reach my dreams a little sooner.  

Who are the folks who work at your market stand?

That’s my picking crew, and field crew. They’ve been with me—some of them—12 years.

What’s your best seller at the Summit Market?

I’d say two best sellers: it would have to be the tomatoes and the sweet corn. It’s neck and neck—one week it’s tomatoes the next week, sweet corn.

What’s the hardest thing about what you do?

Probably dealing with the weather. You can’t predict it; you just got to deal with it. That’s an element of hardship that you just got to live with sometimes. This year I had to forgo a lot of crops because I could not plant them; I couldn’t get the seed in the ground because of the rain. Late April, early May, we got lucky: we had a week that was in the 90s. It was pretty dry so we got a lot of stuff done. But after that it was too wet. The beginning of May it was too late to plant some of the lettuces. So I had to wait until July, which is usually the time I get my last crop in.

What do you like best about what you do?  

I like meeting people. So the retailing, I like that part of it. And I like producing something–watching it from start to finish, and trying to improve the quality, and doing it cheaper, and the competitiveness of it, I kind of like that too.