Keith Stocker is no stranger to waiting.
It’s a trait inherent to most farmers, patience. Something about spending year after year in the same cycle of planting, fertilizing, spraying, trimming, tending, harvesting fosters an unshakeable patience in the people who do it.
On any farm, things move simultaneously at breakneck speed and at a glacial pace. On a drizzly fall afternoon, Stocker Farms in Snohomish is abuzz with activity: parents push strollers past trucks offering hot apple cider and kettle corn, kids meander the muddy field in search of the perfect jack o’lantern. When darkness falls, the cheery farm setting will be transformed into Stalker Farms, and teens and couples will file into the Halloween-inspired corn maze — perhaps never to emerge.
During its peak fall season, the farm employs over 150 workers, many of them high schoolers. There’s never a dull…