PERFECT PICK

It’s a sunny day in August at Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm and farm manager Janet (Pyrah) Dinwiddie is confronted with a disgruntled customer.

The customer wants carrots.

“They aren’t ready,” Janet says.

“Why?” the customer persists.

“We haven’t had enough sunshine,” Janet says. “They’re just too little.”

The 4-year-old tow-headed customer fixes Janet with a scrutinizing look, then scrambles to catch up with her mother, looking for another vegetable to glean.

Janet smiles. It’s a perfect day to run Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm, she says. “It’s such an incredible place.”

She likes to think of it as “farmtopia.”

That Janet and her family have developed the farm into an agricultural destination helped the Pyrah family of the Butte earn accolades as the 2010 Alaska Farm Family of the Year. They will be honored at a special reception Thursday at the Alaska State Fair.

It was 1979 when Ted and Katie Pyrah, Janet’s parents, began farming a 277-acre charity farm for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It wasn’t an assignment they were expecting, said Ted, who grew up on a farm in Idaho.

He was called before the church elders and told he and Katie had been chosen to run the farm — not by them, but by God.

“‘We’ve asked the Lord who we need,’” Ted recalled them saying, “‘The Lord wants you up there.’”

“It was kind of a surprise,” Ted admitted. “I was not looking for more work.”

And it was work — a lot of it. First the farm was located in Palmer, but two years later, relocated to where Pyrah’s remains today off Bodenburg Loop in the Butte, under the shadow of Pioneer Peak.

For Ted, working full-time at the University of Alaska Anchorage running the hospitality-dietary-nutrition program and teaching classes, there were hardly enough hours in the day. He retired there in 2000.

Janet remembers those days.

“He’d come home (from work) and we’d come home (from school) and we’d harvest potatoes,” she recalled.

When it was a charity farm, those receiving its largesse and other church volunteers would help work the land. But when the LDS church discontinued the charity operation in 1988, the Pyrahs leased the farm. There was no more free church labor. It was up to the family to make it work.

“It became his life,” Janet said of her father. “Farming isn’t a two-hour-a-day job.”

He wasn’t the only one committed to the project. Katie had embarked on a life of foreign service after graduating college. She’d worked at embassies in Cairo, Egypt and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When she decided to settle down, she returned to Anchorage where she’d lived as a military kid in 1949. She didn’t know it would lead to a married life and a farm near Palmer.

She and Ted raised their five children on the farm: Preston, Suzanne, Joe, Janet and Lucas.

“It’s turned into a wonderful, overwhelming thing,” Katie said. “The benefit and blessing has been much more valuable than money.”

She credits the other members of her family for the farm’s success.

“I have never been much of a field hand, but I have been a lawn-greenhouse person,” she concedes. She admires the work of her farm family, dealing with the minutia of making the farm successful.

“It’s been neat to supervise them,” she smiled.

While each of the Dinwiddie children worked on the farm, it is Janet and her husband, Joe Dinwiddie, a teacher at Fronteras School, and Lucas who help manage the farm now. Janet and Joe took over for their parents when, in 2007, Ted and Katie left for 18 months to serve as LDS missionaries. Lucas came aboard to help Janet do something she admits she can’t handle — the mechanical aspects of farming. Lucas has a background in automotive and heavy equipment mechanics.

Neither Janet nor Lucas ever expected to be willingly working at Pyrah’s as adults with families of their own. They’d left the farm to go to college, certain they’d not be back.

“I did appreciate it then, but I didn’t fully appreciate it,” Janet said. “When we moved back, we knew it was the right thing to do.”

“I never planned on coming back to farming,” Lucas admitted. “I love the fact I was raised on this farm but you don’t realize until you are 25 or 30 years old how lucky you were to be raised out here.”

Still, when Janet raised the notion of Lucas giving up his job with Peterbilt and joining her working on the farm, there might have been pause. There wasn’t.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Lucas said. “I felt good about it.”

It is not just the opportunity to raise their own families on the farm, they said. Janet and Joe have four children; Lucas and his wife, Jill, a former Pyrah’s farm worker, have three with another due later this year.

Together, they not only raise vegetables, but fruit, sod, hay and some trees. They also offer agro-tourism opportunities through tours and the annual Fall Harvest Festival.

It is about continuing to offer to their customers an opportunity to experience Alaska agriculture first hand — sharing with others the beauty and the bounty, they said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Janet said.

Lucas said his reward is seeing the fruits of their labor and seeing the people affected.

“It just puts a smile on your face at the end of the day,” he said, then gestured to the sunshine-soaked fields around him. “Having this as an office isn’t a bad deal either.”

For Janet, who started Pyrah’s annual festival five years ago, it is about giving other families a chance to enjoy a snippet of the farm life her family has enjoyed for decades.

“We know you can feel this positive, good, salt-of-the-earth feeling here,” she said. “Why not share it with the community?”

Looking back at their more than 30 years on the farm, 75-year-old Ted’s memories aren’t about a great crop of peas or a bad year for cauliflower, or even endless hours of back-breaking labor. They are of the beauty of the farm, where coyotes, foxes, moose, cranes and owls celebrate each season in their own ways, with the Pyrahs and their children — and now grandchildren — enjoying the splendor long after the U-Pick crowd had gone home.

“The value here was my kids,” he said. “The value of this is, I guess you have to call it priceless. There is no dollar value to it.”

And he said he knows that, no matter what may happen with the land they lease in the future, he and his family are where they belong. He has divine confirmation.

“I know it’s right.”