story and photos by Nancy Peevy, special to The City Wire
The Dig In Food and Farming Festival brought several hundred farmers, gardeners, foodies and families together on Friday (March 6) and Saturday (March 7) in Springdale to celebrate and learn about local food, farms and gardens.
The event began Friday afternoon at the Jones Center in Springdale with a regional Farm to School forum, followed by a reception at Fairlane Station in downtown Springdale that featured food from Wood Stone Craft Pizza, Greenhouse Grille, Arsaga’s at the Depot and The Hive, as well as local brew from Ozark Beer Company.
Charity Lewis, co-producer of the event and owner of Chicken Moon Farm, said that the purpose of the event is to help promote community among growers and help them make connections with local businesses.
“A lot of us farmers get disconnected because we have to work so hard out in our own spots and so it’s a really good way to come together, to network, to have social time and to see what each other is doing,” Lewis said.
She said the festival puts emphasis on exchanges between growers and businesses because one of their goals is to help local businesses use local food, thereby growing the local economy.
“For example, Bill at Spring Street Grill – we were able to grab some of our growers that we know and provide him with fresh food from the local area so that he could prepare it and bring it today to sell at our festival,” she said.
Cheri LaRue, co-producer of the event and owner of Green Fork Farm, said that another emphasis of the festival is on educating people about sustainable food and local farming.
“We feel like the way we can be sustainable is to do as much local as we can. With this event, what we hope to do is to get people together who would like to learn more about how they can do that,” she said.
Guests at the reception could also meet the event’s keynote speaker, Douglas Gayeton. Gayeton is an artist, filmmaker, writer, photographer, and director of the “Know Your Food” series for PBS. He is the author of “LOCAL: The New Face of Food and Farming in America.”
On Saturday at the Jones Center, guests attended classes, films, discussions, an information and vendor fair, a seed and tool exchange and children’s workshops. Gayeton gave the keynote address, “Rebuilding Local Food Systems.”
Classes for the event included “Yoga for Gardeners”, “Get Pickled with Cat: Fermenting Vegetables and Kefir”, “Organic Fruit Production in Northwest Arkansas”, “No-Till Budget Gardening”, “Goats 101: Getting Started”, “Backyard Chickens”, “Future Food: Crickets” and “From Grain to Glass – Beer and How to Brew It.”
Children’s workshops, such as “Wiggling World of Worm Compost”, “No Bees, No Cheese: The Importance of Pollinators”, and “Kids: Art in the Garden with Foodcorps”, were new to the event this year.
“We gear the classes more towards things that anyone might be interested in doing, not just farmers,” LaRue said. “People who are interested in gardening or doing things for yourself.”
This year the Festival partnered with Fayetteville Public Schools’ Farm to School Seed to Student program and they will receive a portion of the proceeds, LaRue said. The Seed to Student program “empowers children and their families to make informed food choices while strengthening the local economy and contributing to a vibrant community.”
According to a video on the Fayetteville Public School website, the program strives to use local food in the school cafeterias: gets school children involved in a school garden: and provides education on the importance of purchasing local food, supporting the local economy and taking care of the local environment.
Main sponsors for the Dig In Festival included Green Fork Farm in Farmington, Chicken Moon Farm in Fayetteville and Specialized Real Estate Group of Fayetteville.