Field to Fork

Local food producers from around Idaho came to the JUMP center in Boise on February 12^th for the Field to Fork festival, an event designed to allow the makers of a huge variety of Idaho food products to make direct connections to buyers, markets and retailers they might otherwise not be able to meet.

Verbatim:

I'm Tammie Halcomb. I'm the executive director of FARE Idaho.

FARE is a nonprofit, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for the local food system. So everything from field to fork, farms, ranches, restaurants, retailers and distributors, and everywhere in between, we make sure that our homegrown products can get to market via restaurants and retailers.

Today is the culmination of that mission. We have our restaurant owners, we have our producers, we have our retailers, we have our chefs, we have everyone in between here at our event. It is called Field to Fork because it is what we represent here today.

We have representation here across the from across the entire state, which is really nice. This is a grant funded program, an FMPP grant (Farmers Market Promotion Program) that we were able to receive from the USDA. This is our last year with that grant. So it's really nice to be able to finish strong that program and really tell the USDA how the producers really want to be able to get to market and how that looks.

We have a lot to offer this year. Over the summer, we took this up to Sandpoint and we learned some things from being up there, what was really working for that community up there. So this year we introduced a buyers hour. So our buyers have been invited, we hand wrote them, literal hand wrote them invitations so they could come and they can say hello to our producers here and make those connections so that our producers can have that access to the buyers and get to market more easily. A lot of our producers don't have the market funding to be able to come and go tour all of the different buyers. Our hope is that they can come here for a really low booth fee cost and meet the buyers that they need to have access to the markets.

We also have 4 panels talking about different things that are impacting our food system, local economy, economic development, workforce development. We have 4 chef-led classes, which is awesome. If you've ever wanted to eat ostrich, here is where you can do it.

We have wine, we have beer, we have distilleries, we have bread, we have everything in between. We have so much stuff here people can do, see. We have BSU doing a workforce training today for entry-level workforce. We have some kids here from Valley View School District, the culinary arts program.

A lot of our producers get started and they're like, well, great, I have all this beautiful food. Who's going to buy that? How do I get access to the consumer? For FARE Idaho, our objective is to be able to get them to any place where there's a market, whether that's a farmers market or a restaurant or a retail location. So today they're going to be connecting through those different means, hoping that we can put people in front of those buyers. In Sandpoint, when we held this over the summer, we had four of our producers make connections that they didn't have before. And now there's wine that's grown here in Canyon County. Up in Sandpoint, there's a few different products that are up there, microgreens that are up there in restaurants now, just because they were able to be at the same place at the same time and make those connections.