Rowley's Red Barn

The Red Barn stands at 901 South 300 West in Santaquin, “in plain site of nearby Interstate-15,” as a 2008 KSL report spelled it. Inside are an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, a scratch bakery, a cider mill, and bins of farm produce. In early October 2026 the farm was posting about apple cider donuts coming out in fresh batches all day, and donut holes in cinnamon sugar or glazed. Pumpkins and gourds were piled for porches and jack-o’-lanterns. The ice cream is made from scratch at the family’s own creamery. A summer 2026 flavor contest was won by Kim Wilding’s Prehistoric Predator: Biscoff cookie ice cream with a caramel ripple, Biscoff cookies, and chocolate toffee bits. The farm said it would stay through October.

Cherries, cider, and a cup of flowers

The shelves carry the farm’s dried tart cherries, Country Spoon products, and dried fruits and nuts coated in chocolate at the family’s own panning facility. The apple juice and cider have been pressed from local apples since 2007, and the farm describes them as fresh, not from concentrate. The store is open six days a week and closed on Sunday.

East of the barn is the U-pick flower garden, which costs nothing to walk through. A $15 cup, sold inside the barn, holds whatever a picker can fit into it. The farm tested one in August 2026 and packed in 46 blooms. By late September a few plants were winding down, but the farm reported that much of the garden was still good for a fall bouquet.

Wagons to the Back Forty

The 2026 Fall Festival runs from September 19 to October 30. Visitors park at the barn, scan or buy tickets at the booth, and wait for a wagon. Tractors pull the wagons out every 8 to 10 minutes on a ride through the fruit farm to the Back Forty. General admission is $12 Monday through Thursday and $15 on Friday and Saturday, and every ticket includes one ride on the train.

The corn maze is 9 acres by the farm’s count and seven acres by the NowPlayingUtah listing carried on Visit Salt Lake. Its 2026 pattern pictures the Red Barn Train, the farm’s newest addition. The grounds around the maze hold:

• jump pads and giant slides
• apple cannons and cable rides
• a corn pit and a kiddie carousel
• a petting zoo and firepits
• acres of pumpkins to search for a jack-o’-lantern
• a trike track and a farm mini golf course, both new for 2026

The Back 40 Grill serves smash burgers, hot dogs, and grilled apple cider donuts à la mode. On weekends there are live bands and a food truck court.

In other years, the barn’s autumn also included the Harvest Festival. Pickers crossed the road into the orchard, stopped at a tent on the left side of the lane for bags and instructions, and were asked not to climb the trees. In Fall 2026 there is none. Spring frost caused what the farm calls a total crop loss, leaving no apples to pick, and the farm has said it will be back the following fall.

Around the farm year

The season starts before the trees leaf out:

• Easter. The 2026 Easter celebration, on March 28, sent wagons to the Back Forty for an egg scavenger hunt, baby chicks and bunnies to hold, and a candy cannon that fired every hour on the hour.
• Blossom Festival. In mid-April visitors come to photograph the orchards in bloom, on dates the weather sets.
• Sunflower Festival. This runs in August. In 2026 the field moved beside the Train Park, reached on foot through the orchard or partway by train, and the festival was extended through September 5.
• Orchard Dinner. Held on September 5 and 19, 2026, it served slow-smoked brisket, pulled pork, apple crisp with vanilla ice cream and caramel, and all-you-can-drink carbonated apple cider among the trees.

Summer has also brought the Orchard Days Cherry Pit Spit. On August 4, 2018, the Daily Herald found contestants paying $1 each for three tart cherries, then spitting the pits across a chalk-measured parking lot, divided by gender and age. Some pits went 30 feet and farther. Todd Rowley, vice president of Rowley’s South Ridge Farms and one of five Rowley brothers working the farm, said the contest had run for approximately 15 years. It began as a rivalry among siblings on long harvest days. “It’s always been a competition as we’ve been harvesting cherries,” he said. In a lot of years, he said, the family gave the day’s pit-spit money and ice cream sales to charity.

From a fruit stand to two barns

The family’s own history says it has been tied to fruit growing since 1913. The 2008 KSL report says the Rowleys became one of Utah’s first commercial fruit growers in the early 1900s and calls Phil Rowley a third-generation grower.

In 1984 Phil and Shirley Rowley started their own farm and business in Santaquin. The farm’s history page says they raised eight sons on it. A 2025 St. George News story says seven. According to that story, Phil taught by day and then went to the fields to work beside his sons until the job was done.

Accounts of the crops vary by source:

• The farm. It lists apples, cherries, peaches, pumpkins, and alfalfa.
• KSL in 2008. It added apricots and sweet cherries and named tart cherries the largest crop.
• The Utah Farm Bureau in 2023. It put the land at over 900 acres.
• St. George News in 2025. It said over 1,000.

The barn grew out of a small fruit stand on the farm. The family dates it to 1999, the year it began selling ice cream and could stay open year round. The state agritourism listing, written by the farm, gives September 1999, and a Farm Credit profile says the late 1990s. The cider mill and the chocolate panning facility followed a few years later.

Phil Rowley also grew pumpkins to supplement the stand and let visitors pick their own after a wagon ride to the field. The Giant Slide went up in 2010, and the first corn maze was grown in 2015.

In 2013 the family opened a second store in Washington, in southern Utah. St. George News reported that it spent about ten years in Cotton Town Village beside Riggatti’s Wood Fired Pizza before moving to Telegraph Street.

A dryer for tart cherries

In the late 1970s, according to Kenyon Farley of Valley View Orchards, most of Utah’s tart cherries were pitted and canned as pie filling. Tastes were changing. A Michigan co-op tried drying cherries with steam ovens, and Utah growers tried the method too. Both gave it up because the drying was uneven and left enough moisture to grow mold.

In the mid-1980s Phil Rowley consulted dehydration experts at the University of California at Davis and toured the plants where prunes and apricots were dried. He came home with a prototype idea that would dry cherries using fans. By 1987, after years of trial and error, South Ridge Farms was producing dried cherries that were colorful and plump with minimal moisture. Rowley told the Salt Lake Tribune that the farm was then one of only two successful drying operations in the country. Not long after, it combined operations with the Payson Fruit Growers cooperative.

Farm Credit credits Phil with rebuilding a dryer that kept the cherries’ bright red color and tart flavor, and reports that the cooperative has since built eight new large driers. St. George News says he patented the machinery. In 2015, when more than 90 percent of Utah’s tart cherry crop was being dried, he was the cooperative’s general manager. “Phil really got it started,” Farley said. Rowley himself put it this way: “It was a great opportunity to create a piece of machinery that was capable of producing such a fine product.”

In 2023 he was named Cherry Industry Person of the Year. He traveled with three of his sons to Traverse City, Michigan, to accept the award at the National Cherry Festival Industry Day celebration.