Saving the Best for Last

Where has the time gone? With only two more weeks of my internship left, I'm using this last blog to sum up my intern project and the success story.

Kentucky Proud Food to Fork Dinner:

After hearing talk in the office from the agents about the Kentucky Department of Agriculture funding grants to put on a Kentucky Proud Dinner called Food to Fork and how cool they thought it would be, I decided to take it on as my intern project. The local food movement in Paris has been an uprising battle. With the Farmer's Market in Paris about to close last year and for Central Kentucky to have such a niche for local food right now, I thought this dinner would be a great way highlight some of the Kentucky Proud producers here in Bourbon County and to help introduce local produce into the community. My first step was to find a venue, after talking about a few locations with in the office I decided on The Farm at Land Works in Paris (Bourbon County), The Farm at Land Works is a Kentucky Proud Agri-tourism farm working on increasing awareness of agriculture and of their landscaping business. After getting my Food to Fork application approved by KDA and a venue picked out the ball started rolling on my project.

I worked with the Snap ED agent in the office to create a menu from Kentucky Proud Plate It Up recipes. We chose to do BBQ Brisket and Pork, Watermelon Tomato Salad (Plate It Up), Cucumber Salad (Plate It Up), Red Skin Potato Salad (Plate It Up), Green beans and Blueberry Cream Cheese Pound Cake (Plate It Up). After getting my menu I then had to find people to prepare the food. For the BBQ I went with a local BBQ vendor, Broken Arrow BBQ, we purchased the brisket and pork from a local producer. We also got the BBQ from a local Kentucky Proud business. For the Potato Salad and Green Beans I went to the local Country Club, someone had recently bought the country club and has been reaching out to the community to grab a new audience so they where happy to help. The produce for those two sides came from two local Kentucky Proud producers. Thyme Cafe and Catering then did the Watermelon Tomato Salad and the Blueberry Cream Cheese Pound Cake. All produce also came from local producers. Thyme is another local restaurant. I wanted to make sure I let numerous local restaurants to help out with this event because we are supporting local food and local businesses. The extension office and my self made the cucumber salad. After collecting the produce, ALL produce came from Bourbon County other than the Watermelons that came from Evan's Orchard in Georgetown. I had to work with the Farmer's Market and our Horticulture Agent to find what producers had what. 




I also went to other local businesses and collected door prizes to highlight different agriculture and non-agriculture businesses. I also encouraged those businesses to come set up at the event. I had a local Lavender Farm, UK, KDA educational trailer and other producers come set up as "vendors." These vendors received a hand held hole punch. Everyone at the event had to get their tickets hole punched by at least three vendors to be entered for a door prize. This encouraged everyone to visit these businesses to help advertise. We ended up with about 30 different door prizes.

At first when I started this project I felt as if I was begging people to attend. I finally got up to 30 tickets sold out of the 100 I needed to sell. After we sent out post cards and I advertised at the fair, the Monday after the fair I went to selling 30 tickets to past 100 and started a waiting list. I ended up taking 130 people due to venue space I could not take the rest of the waiting list. The response to my event was over whelming and really showed to interest of the local food movement in Bourbon County.
The day of the event, July 7th at 6:00 pm. We had plenty of food and the rain held off. I had a local singer come sing, I did a welcome where I introduced the producers and Kentucky Proud Producers at the event and we then did dinner (buffet style). After dinner Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles came and spoke about the Food to Fork Program and the impact of local food in Kentucky and Bourbon County. Our next speaker was Brent Burchett from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture and he talked about Agriculture as a whole in Kentucky. We had a few other special guests as well, Mike Williams (Bourbon County Judge) and Steve West (Kentucky Senator).  After the speakers, quests had time to go visit vendors to get their ticket punched for door prizes. We then gave out door prizes. By this time is was 8:30 and after those were given out people started leaving.
 

The over all results of the event was very successful. The next two weeks I will work on gathering all receipts and working with the budget we had created with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture to receive our Food to Fork grant to receive a 50/50 reimbursement for the event.