09/21/2026
This little apple orchard 40 minutes west of Sheboygan has better urban design than most cities on this continent.
Despite being in the middle of nowhere, making a car nearly essential to visit it, The Little Farmer has created a walkable paradise. It starts at the parking lot, which is well shaded with thoughtfully planted trees. People leave their cars and depart on foot. It’s unlikely they paid expensive consultants for the handmade wayfinding signs these walkers soon encounter, but they seem to work just fine. Nearby, wagons shuttle people out to the orchards - a rural form of free and frequent transit.
The farm itself is anchored by a central square, with benches placed in the shade, and vendors selling apples, brats, burgers, and crafts in the center. Old barns and a farm house are put to new uses as shops and a cafe.
Children aren’t an afterthought here, with play equipment, a diaper changing station, and what seems to be the favorite attraction- a pile of straw bales to climb and run on.
If little farmer were designed the way we build cities and towns, it would be a much different place.
Cities know that people want to drive right up to their destination and park, so pavement would be needed between the rows of apples, allowing you to drive to your tree of choice and pick. The central square would become a parking lot, allowing easy access to the cafe and farm shops.
The playgrounds can stay, but we’ll need fences to keep the kids in so they don’t run out into the busy roads crisscrossing the property on the way to the orchards.
The old farmhouse isn’t a great set-up for a cafe, so we’ll tear that down in favor of a more standardized and flexible strip-mall style concrete box. And surely metal pre-fab sheds would hold just as many goods as the historic barns, but with considerably fewer maintenance concerns.
So why doesn’t the little farmer ‘modernize’ in the way our cities have?
This farm has been in operation for over 150 years, with apples serving as the main crop for more than half of that time. It’s unlikely that Little Farmer has objectively the best apples. Nor the cheapest. They do not have the most varieties. This is not the easiest place to get to.
What they seem to understand is that making somewhere that is beautiful and economically prosperous is not mutually exclusive. People, even those who arrive by car, will leave that car behind if there are viable alternatives, and the experience of walking is pleasant. Placemaking doesn’t need to be expensive or grand, it can be simple, useful, and enjoyable. Old buildings can be adapted to new uses, and even if awkward, their beauty and authenticity provide more value than can be measured by crude math. Little Farmer shows us that we still know how to make, maintain, and evolve great places.
Where this analogy falls short is this is one property, with one owner. Every visitor, whether they buy a caramel apple, a pumpkin muffin, or a double brat, is creating monetary value for them. In our cities, it’s not immediately visible that this synergy exists. You may see your customer come in for a cup of coffee, and be oblivious to the fact that the reason they’re there is because they stopped at the thrift store nearby in search of a sweater, saw your outdoor seating, and decided to make a detour to enjoy the morning. (ok maybe that example isn’t the one, but you get it)
It is natural for any business to want to maximize convenience for their specific customer, even at the expense of the quality of public space, if they can’t immediately see these relationships. When you degrade a public space in the name of car access and easy parking for each business, you reach your logical conclusion, a strip mall. I’m sure you could sell many apples at a strip mall. But for those who love great public spaces, they can journey to Little Farmer, every fall, for a bit of inspiration, and maybe a muffin and some apples too.
