Summer on the Gulf Coast has a signature flavor, and for thousands of Baldwin County households it arrives by the half bushel: Devotion, the white supersweet corn hybrid that the Krupinski family of Foley has made famous across the county. The Krupinskis were the first in Baldwin County to grow the variety, and they have sold it directly to the public for 18 years, first by word of mouth, later through a Facebook following that draws first-time customers every season.
“I just put a sign on the corner that said ‘Sweet Corn’ and vacationers and locals would stop and buy it,” farmer Mark Krupinski recalled of the pre-social-media days. The family first grew Silver King, a white sweet corn variety, before switching to Devotion, which Mark considers better, not least because it takes South Alabama’s weather better than most, standing up to the winds when summer squalls blow through. Cooked simply, cut from the cob and sauteed in butter for about two minutes, it is the kind of corn that inspires loyalty and freezer-stashing.
From Nebraska to Foley, 1926
The farm’s story begins nearly a century ago. Mark’s Polish grandfather came to Baldwin County from Nebraska and bought the first 40 acres in 1926, growing mainly potatoes. The family says the farm is now in its 100th year of operation.
That grandfather, Rudolph Krupinski, came south after the L and M Railroad offered Midwest farmers cheaper land in the area, according to the family. He planned to raise potatoes as a cash crop, but the first year’s harvest was poor, and he nearly gave up. Mark said his grandfather, who he believes had four daughters with him at the time, was ready to pack up and head back to Nebraska. The bank he was dealing with, Mark said, all but begged him to stay one more year and helped him get through it. “The next year, made a good crop and it’s been history since then, so we’ve been here ever since,” Mark said.
The second generation was Rudolph’s son, Mark’s father, John, who farmed into old age before dying last year at 90. Mark, his sister Tammy Krupinski-Mason and their older brother Joe make up the third generation, and they now run the operation with Mark’s wife Diane, who keeps the farm’s books, and his mother Margaret. Mark’s son Alexander works on the farm, and younger son Nicholas was set to join the summer fields before heading to Auburn to study agriculture.
“This is a family farm,” Mark said. “I promised my dad that we would keep it going and my sons want that as well.” Four generations and almost 100 years later, the operation has scaled up and down with the county around it. The family once leased land where the Home Depot and Lowe’s on Highway 59 now stand, farming as many as 2,000 acres in that era, and grew strawberries for 20 years before stopping about four years ago.
Farm-to-Table Before It Was Trendy
The Krupinskis practiced selling fresh, local produce straight to consumers long before farm-to-table became a marketing term. Over the years the farm moved away from row cropping and toward selling directly to the public. Krupinski-Mason traces the beginning to a single table of tomatoes her mother set out under a big oak tree on the property, where people would buy tomatoes straight out of the field. As the season went on and watermelons came in, her father would stack a double-height row of melons along what was then a dirt road, and she would sit out there all day selling them when she was 7 or 8 years old. “It started with me,” she said.
From there the business grew. An early outlet was Margaret’s two-car farmhouse garage, where she sold mostly corn and tomatoes. Today the farm stand on the property at 18625 Charolais Road, between Highway 65 and Highway 59, sells everything the farm grows in season: squash, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and more, alongside the corn. The location between the two highways makes beachgoers steady customers throughout the summer.
The market runs a seasonal calendar. It stays open until the end of July, closes through the hottest weeks, and reopens in October when fall vegetables like greens, broccoli and cabbage come in. Hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Saturday 9 to 4 and Sunday 10 to 2.
Customers Who Keep Coming Back
Loyal customers line up for the harvest, and many say the freshness is what brings them back year after year.
“Their vegetables are wonderful. Always tasty. It’s just the only place I’ll buy vegetables,” said Kim Gomenis, who was first in line one morning.
“Well, it’s just because the stuff is so good. It’s just really, really fresh,” said George “Jerry” Lipscomb, a customer for years.
The family feels that loyalty. “It really makes you feel good. It makes you humble to know all of these people really appreciate and they wait for us to open every year, so we take that as a blessing,” Krupinski-Mason said.
Mark said hearing from customers is one of the best parts of the job. “You see people enjoying it and they come back and they say, ‘Yeah, we really love this corn. We really love this or that,’ and that makes you feel good because you know you’re doing something good out here,” he said.
Customers are happy to share how they cook it, too. One recommended cutting the kernels from at least two ears and cooking them in a skillet with butter, salt, pepper and a splash of water for about 10 minutes. “You’ll never go back to a can,” that customer said. Julie McKenzie-Morgan takes corn she has put up in the freezer and bakes it with heavy cream, butter, salt and pepper for about 40 minutes. Greg Lipscomb pulls the silks, folds the husks back around the ear and puts it on the grill, while Jerry Lipscomb said he just eats whatever Greg fixes.
Picked at 6 A.M., Watered by Hard Hose
The labor model has not changed with the generations: family does the work. The picking starts in the field at 6 a.m., sometimes with an assist from the sons’ friends, and Mark jokes that by the end of the season he will have lost ten pounds and be in great shape. Irrigation relies on an old-style hard hose reel that waters about five acres at a time and takes roughly seven hours to drag into position, supplemented by drip systems plumbed to wells in some fields.
Mark, Tammy, Joe, Diane and the couple’s youngest son, Nicholas, pick squash, melons and peppers for the stand. Alexander, the eldest son and a fourth-generation farmer, is in charge of picking the corn and getting it to the stand each morning, harvesting about 130 bushels a day over several weeks of the season.
“Luckily, we’ve still been able to get the corn puller through the field and not have to do it by hand, but it has happened, you know. We get too much rain and we have to go out there and pull it by hand,” Alexander said. He said he loves the work: “I love waking up every morning and coming out here. Now that I have my friends out here, I love working with them. It’s fun all the time. It’s always different. Something different every day.”
When a visitor hoped aloud that his sons would have sons, extending the farm to a fifth generation, Mark corrected her without hesitation: some of his best field hands were girls who worked several summers before leaving for college. “They had young backs and I was sorry when they left,” he said.
Carrying On a Legacy
Diane Krupinski said her mother-in-law has long been the heart of the operation. “My mother-in-law Margaret, she was always the backbone of this farm,” she said. Since her father-in-law’s death, Diane said, it can seem like much of it falls on her, and even before then John would ask her to pass instructions along to “the boys.”
For Nicholas, the work is about more than a summer job. “I’m carrying on something my great grandfather started and because of that, that’s a good reason for me to keep going and doing it and no matter how much I sweat or how much the gnats bother me, hey, I’m carrying on a legacy,” he said.
Mark said he is confident the farm will outlast his generation. “It’s great that we’re still able to do what my grandfather came here in ’26 and continued it on and hopefully it will go on,” he said. “I’m pretty sure my boys have it instilled in their hearts too that this is what belongs here is the crops and stuff.” He added that his father, in his later years, often said the farm’s future was the direct-to-customer business the family runs today.
His sons are being trained to take over one day, and Mark’s teaching philosophy mirrors his own career: education helps, but hands-on experience is the best teacher. “The crops we grow are versatile and I learn something new every day,” he said. For Baldwin County shoppers, the proof is in the produce aisle, and in the sweet corn that sells out summer after summer, nearly a hundred years after a farmer from Nebraska first put a plow in the Foley dirt.
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