Van Ommering Dairy Farm

This place is like Disneyland, especially during fall/​winter months when they have the pumpkin patch and Xmas tree farms open. TONS for kids to do from games, hayrides, petting zoos, to watching movies on a huge projector. This place is great for families and schools even do educational field trips here to see how the dairy works and learn about animals. I’m an adult and I love this place. You can’t find cheaper pumpkins or trees or a better place to start a family tradition of going every year. Your kids will love it

Even though I’m 25, I always have a fun time at the Van Ommering Dairy. It’s pretty much a place for kids/​families but the owners have obviously put a lot of work into it and there’s some pretty fun stuff there.
My most recent visit involved a bunch of my older neighbors transplanting our yearly Christmas block party to the farm and sneaking in flasks of liquor to get drunk on the hayride. It was a pretty uncomfortable evening for me since there is a giant age gap between me and my neighbors and I wasn’t drinking. I still had a pretty good time, though, which I guess is testament to the entertainment value of the farm.
There’s a couple basketball games and something where you throw a football through hoops. I especially liked the football game and I killed about 45 minutes playing that with one of my neighbor’s kids. There’s also a giant hill of some kind of seeds (cotton maybe? I’m no farmer) that you can slide down on a sled. Basically like sledding down a hill of snow, but much softer and way more appropriate for Southern California weather. The whole thing was pretty ingenious.
They also have a petting zoo, which is kind of unique in that it contains young calves. I also loved the area where you can try to lasso bales of hay with plastic steers’ heads. I know, all this stuff is for kids, but it was pretty cool. I think they also have something where you can emulate milking a cow through some setup with rubber utters but for some reason I haven’t yet tried it.
I’ve been on the hayride twice there and both times it was driven by one of the dudes who owns the farm, so he was obviously really knowledgeable. He drives you around the farm and through a couple of places where they keep the cows and talks about how they run the farm, how they milk the cows, what the cows do all day, etc. It’s actually pretty in-​depth stuff. The cows can roam around and have different «activities» they do throughout the day. They have a special barn where they sleep that has air mattresses for them to lay on. It’s fairly smelly and inevitably a cow will poop and a little kid will get excited about it, but the tour’s all pretty interesting.
Around Halloween, they have a pumpkin patch and they give out recipes of things you can make from the pumpkins. I think the recipe I got was for pumpkin bread, which I was determined to make until I waited too long and the pumpkin started to rot. Oh, procrastination.
I’m glad there’s an independent dairy in the community because as much as I hate the weird backwardness of Lakeside, I also really love anything that keeps it tied to the Old West in my mind. Considering I’m 25 and have no children and still have a great time at the dairy, it seems like it would be a total blast for kids.