Thanks to its fall festival, ‘downtown ranch’ still standing strong

Like a lot of family farmers and ranchers these days, Heather Limon and her brother Dalon Hinckley have to be creative to stay afloat.

That explains the couple thousand people right now standing in their field.

It's harvest time, and from the middle of September until the end of October, the Cross E Ranch hosts what it calls the Sunflower Festival. For $18 for grownups and $13 for kids, the public is invited to step through the gates and step back in time. There's everything from pig races to corn mazes to pony rides to hay rides to face painting to picking your own pumpkins and plenty more. For dinner, there's hamburgers that were Cross E cows just a couple weeks ago, and the festival's signature donuts that Dalon and Heather learned to make while attending a seminar on Ag Entertainment — that's the fancy name that describes farms that engage in this sort of behavior.

The Cross E is the closest decent-sized ranch to downtown Salt Lake City still standing. You could leave the City Creek mall and be there in 10 minutes. The boundaries used to include land where the Salt Lake International Airport now sits — until the state bought it from the Hinckleys in the early 1960s to expand the airport. Less than 65 years ago, the runways that today bring in jets from around the world were the domain of the Cross E's 3,000 cows.

The current proprietors, Heather and Dalon, represent the fifth generation of a farming family that dates back to Utah's earliest roots, starting with Latter-day Saint pioneer Ira Hinckley, who in the 1800s farmed in the central Utah town of Hinckley, which was named after him. Ira's son Alonzo took over until he was called to be a Latter-day Saint apostle in 1934 and moved to Salt Lake, where Alonzo's sons Rulon and Azra continued the family farming tradition by purchasing the land where the airport now sits.

Next came David Hinckley, Rulon's son and Dalon and Heather's father. After selling the airport ground, he settled into the Cross E's current location at 3500 North, 2200 West, buying the property, and the Cross E brand, from descendants of fabled Utah sheep rancher Tom Jeremy.

With urban sprawl encroaching on all sides like ragweed, the Cross E has shrunk considerably over the decades. Today it's down to 200 acres and 52 cows. That's still plenty, and then some, for Dalon and Heather to manage, but not enough to make sufficient money to be profitable.

Hence, the festival, where city folk can marvel at a ranch just a couple miles from Target and Starbucks and learn, as Heather says, "the difference between a dog and a goat."

Heather puts it plain why 10 years ago they decided to start having these harvest days open houses (in addition to the fall event, they have a baby animals festival in the spring): "We would like this to remain a farm," she says.

But along the way they've been surprised by two developments: One, people love to come to the farm, as evidenced by the crowds that have grown from 3,000 visitors at the first festival to 88,000 last year. Two, Heather and Dalon love having them come.

"It's a good experience both ways," says Heather. "We get so many comments from people who say things like, 'Wow, this is such a great place and you just feel calm when you come out here.'"

The same calm she and Dalon have been feeling their whole lives, the same calm passed down through generations of Hinckley farmers.

"People like my dad, he would have farmed and been a million dollars in debt and not care one little bit, as long as he could still farm," says Heather, who pauses and then adds, "matter of fact, he was a million dollars in debt several times in his life, so that was not unusual."

I asked her what her dad would think of these festivals and this whole new age business of Ag Entertainment.

"Oh, he'd hate it," she laughs, noting that the festivals didn't start happening until David died 10 years ago. "He'd go, 'What in the world are they doing to my property? Driving a tractor in my hayfield?' Every time we go on a hayride and we're in the field, I'm like, 'My dad is probably up there having a fit,' because if we even walked in the field, he was having a heart attack. He's thinking, 'you guys just lost your mind.'"

Then again, the Cross E is still standing, at least for another year, — a family farm and ranch in the shadow of the skyscrapers and the big jumbo jets, defying the odds.

"You kinda do hear the ground talking to you," muses Heather. "My dad used to say, 'If it's a hot day and you just watered the corn, you can hear it growing.'"

The corn may be part of a maze city slickers get lost in these days, but it's still growing.