Farmer who supplied State Fair’s Corn Roast remembered

The Minnesota State Fair means busy season for the Untiedt family farm, suppliers of sweet corn for the wildly popular Corn Roast. Every morning, staff are out before dawn picking that day’s batch of corn.

But this year, the office of farm founder Jerry Untiedt sits still amid the bustle, with old handwritten notes tacked to the walls and file folders strewn across the desk. Untiedt passed away in July at age 77 from heart complications.

His daughter Jenna Untiedt, the farm’s retail operations manager, said it’s been a strange couple of months.

“It’s quiet,” Jenna said. “His truck still sits parked outside the office. You just kind of expect him to come in, and his office just sits empty.”

Jerry Untiedt ran the farm since the 1970s, when he and his wife bought a plot of land in Waverly, west of the Twin Cities. He grew up in Edina, but his daughters said he always wanted to farm.

It started as a small, part-time operation. But over the years it grew, and Jerry turned to farming full time. Now, Untiedt’s Vegetable Farm supplies several roadside produce stands, shops and grocers around the Twin Cities metro area.

It’s still a family operation, run by some of Jerry’s children, their spouses and their children.

His daughter, Megan Dallmann, now manages the farm’s office. She grew up doing a little bit of everything around the farm, from working produce stands to sorting green beans in a shed late into the night.

She said her dad’s love for farming drove the business. He was working up until the day he died.

“He didn’t want to miss out on anything,” Dallmann said. “He wanted to be involved in everything. … It was his passion, and he wanted to make sure he knew what was going on.”

Above all else, Jerry’s family said, he was committed to getting people good-quality vegetables. If a customer’s order turned out wrong, Jerry would sometimes head out into the fields himself in the middle of the night to harvest a replacement.

And he took that same pride in growing the sweet corn for the state fair’s Corn Roast. The booth has been a mainstay of the fair for more than 40 years, selling close to 250,000 ears during each fair. Jerry loved a challenge — and this was a big one.

The Untiedt farm has been the Corn Roast’s sole supplier for two decades. They plant about 25 acres, and it all has to be ripe just in time for the fair’s 12-day run. It’s harvested the same day it’s roasted; staff pick the day’s order before dawn and drive the corn about an hour to the fairgrounds.

Jenna Untiedt said getting the right amount of corn is a delicate math problem, based on years of growing data — and a little luck.

“He never liked to do anything the easy way, and not always on purpose,” Jenna said of her father. “He chose the challenging route a lot of times, but I think it was the challenge that he appreciated.”

It’s also how he met Brad Ribar, who runs the Corn Roast at the fair. Ribar said he looked up to Jerry. When it came to the fair, they shared the same priority: making the best possible corn.

“The guy just did anything he could to make the best quality,” Ribar said. “He wasn’t worried about the money as much as the quality, and that’s what we liked. We never talk price … and I never know what I’m paying ‘til after the fair. Never ask him. And he liked that, I liked that.”

On the first day of this year’s fair, thousands of people stopped by the Corn Roast for a snack. Inside the booth, teenage staffers blasted music and braved the heat of the roasters to churn out cob after cob. Customers packed the street, cobs in hand.

Fairgoer Emma Lehman came by with her mom, Lisa Lehman. They stop by every year. While the fair’s new, flashy foods might be hit or miss, the Lehmans said the humble corn roast always delivers.

“Of the times that I’ve been here, I’ve never had a bad one,” Emma said.

“Guaranteed satisfaction,” Lisa agreed.

Ribar said that’s what Jerry wanted to hear when he visited, watching from the sidelines as cob after cob came off the grill.

“He’d come here and just watch the people, big smile on his face,” Ribar said.

Ribar said he had an empty feeling finishing preparations without Jerry this year. But he was still excited to share Jerry’s last crop of corn with fairgoers.