The Our Local Plate Farm Fest and Market was held on Saturday, September 14, 2024 as a local foods celebration for the whole community.
This on-farm event at Doubting Thomas Farms featured a farmers’ market, chef demos and a savory meal from Heart-n-Soul Community Café, all from the local bounty of the season. Chef demos included a foraging workshop from local chef Candace Stock of Bernbaums and chef and author Beth Dooley, who signed copies of her new cookbook.
Northwest Minnesota is known as prime farm country, with fertile prairie soils perfect for growing wheat, oats, soybeans, sugar beets, potatoes and more. Bjorn Solberg grew up on a family farm just across the border in Horace ND, helping his dad with their conventional wheat and soybean crops and lending a hand in their big family garden.
Bjorn’s K-12 education emphasized the belief that what happens in life - and in farming - was outside of his control and in the hands of a higher power. That belief heavily shaped his thinking until he went to college and took a sociology class, which presented a new, radical worldview in which human beings operate within man-made systems that have been created over time and could, in fact, be changed. Feeling empowered and inspired, Bjorn decided to build on his agriculture background and become an entrepreneur. He explains, “I realized I wanted to make an impact in life and do something out of the ordinary. I had an epiphany that the future is ahead of me, and we’re not adapting as quickly as times are changing. Then I got the opportunity to buy Hugh’s Gardens and felt the business might be able to make a positive impact in food systems.”
Hugh’s Gardens, LLC is a 100% certified organic storage and packing facility that works with small potato farmers from the Red River Valley region to store, wash, pack and market their potatoes. They sell red, yellow, russet and purple potatoes fresh to distributors, schools, restaurants and stores throughout the Upper Midwest from September through May. Gathering food from several farms into one location to sell to buyers - known as “aggregating” - as Bjorn does, is an important strategy and hopeful business model for farmers meeting demand for local and regional food.
Though Northwest Minnesota is often generalized as commodity crop territory, citizens like Bjorn and Candace
Anderson, a local community organizer and Bjorn’s co-leader for the event Our Local Plate Farm Fest and Market, are part of a passionate tribe wholly committed to fostering a resilient local foods economy in the region. They know their community is hungry for local foods: farm-to-school is growing, the Growing Together Community Gardens are flourishing and the Red River Harvest Cooperative, a community of local producers championing family farm agriculture, providing farm-to-table products and facilitating educational opportunities is thriving. Bjorn and Candace are two of the forces who helped start the cooperative.
Bjorn muses, “There used to be the opinion that local food costs more than what you can get at the conventional grocery store, and some people probably still think that, but I don’t think people consider the value that buying local foods brings to their own community and the economic impact it has. Local food is likely the same price or even cheaper than those same products - let alone a fresher or healthier product. Quality plus cost savings plus less food waste plus a longer shelf life for the product equals a greater value.”
Our Local Plates fulfilled its promise to be a fun-filled day celebrating family farms, sustainable food sources and the economic impact created when citizens invest in our local farmers, ranchers and makers. It provided activities for the whole family, young to young at heart.
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