Home grown
New festival spotlights food security in Durango

SideStory: The Home Grown Festival at a glance

Pete Reardon, owner of Chimney Rock Farms, harvests broccolli from his local farm on Monday afternoon. A first-ever Home Grown Festival is set for Sunday, Oct. 19 in Durango. The event is a community harvest celebration and forum for issues like local food security and sustainability./Photo by David Halterman

by Will Sands

Durango is hoping to take a big step closer to feeding itself this weekend. A first-ever Festival is set for Sun. Oct. 19, and issues like food security and local sustainability are at the foundation of the grassroots happening. Beyond serving as a community harvest festival, Home Grown will offer a community forum on ways to make the dining room table a little more local.

It goes without saying that Durango and La Plata County face unique food challenges. A short growing season, high land prices and geographic isolation have all conspired to make food – and especially locally grown food – a precious commodity on local shelves. Add difficult and expensive transportation into the equation, and the local food balance can get absolutely frightening. Several years ago, Durango City Councilors Michael Rendon and Renee Parsons got thinking about ways to solve this dilemma.

“Locally, there’s been so much more interest in food security, but we do have a long way to go in Durango,” Rendon said. “People still don’t get how hard it is to produce your own food.”

Parsons concurred, adding that not only is it difficult to grow food in Durango, it’s difficult to grow it elsewhere and get it here. “I’ve always been interested in the fact that we are off the beaten path in terms of food distribution and how vulnerable we are,” Parsons said. “We’ve all seen glimpses of it, like last winter when the shelves at our supermarkets were bare for days.”

And as times move forward and expenses grow, it’s becoming clearer that catastrophic winter storms will not be the only things keeping food off the shelves and out of Durangoans’ larders. Jim Dyer, of the Southwest Marketing Network, is a longtime champion of increasing local food security. The Network itself is an effort to connect growers in the region and increase local agricultural production and access to locally grown foods. From Dyer’s perspective, changing economic times carry a mixed blessing. Higher costs at the supermarket are beginning to turn the focus back to local production.

“When you juxtapose the price of food, the cost of fuel and broader economic issues, people are looking at the things we can do well and most appropriately ourselves,” he said.

Dyer commented that there have been strong local efforts toward improving food security and sustainability in recent years. He noted rapid growth in the Durango Farmers Market and the continuing evolution and improvement of the Farms to School program as just two of the many examples of the trend. However, Durango still has a great deal of ground to cover, literally and figuratively.

“We have the capacity to grow more local food for our local area,” Dyer said. “We have good soils, good water and a good climate. We should look at this glass as half full. We just need a little more positive energy.”

Some of that energy could grow from an unlikely source – the apple. That piece of fruit and the trees that bear it, which are so common in La Plata County, are mostly responsible for Sunday’s Home Grown Festival. In germinating the event, Parsons and Rendon looked to the apple as one example of local abundance.

“We as a community always have an abundance of apples,” Parsons noted. “Practically everyone in Durango has apples, and they often go to waste.”

Looking at the apple, the pair wanted to find a way to share that wealth, spread the message and throw a community party at the same time.

On tap for Sunday will be a variety of events pegged to that abundance. An apple press will be running throughout the day, the Bootleggers Society will be on hand brewing up a local apple beer, and there will be pie-eating contests and other fruit-based fare for adults and kids alike.

“We’re trying to be proactive about gleaning the fruit in the community,” Dyer said. “This is what this is all about. Looking at the abundance we have with the fruit that so often goes to waste.”

However, the Home Grown Festival will also go well beyond the apple. A variety of free workshops will run throughout the all-day festival. Topics to be covered include food security, food preservation, lawns to food, and wild foods, among many others.

“It can’t be just a fun apple festival,” Parsons said. “We want to have a community discussion on food sustainability. How can we, as individuals and as a community, best provide for ourselves?”

Parsons, Rendon and all of the Home Grown players are hoping for a solid turnout on Sunday, and there is hope that the message of sustainability will carry through the coming winter and into the next growing season. Who knows? By the second annual Home Grown Festival, Durango may measure food abundance in more than apples.

“The City of Durango really has a role to play in encouraging and bringing people together,” Parsons said. “Events like this will hopefully generate some exciting momentum.”

Rendon added, “There really is a lot of progress and interest these days. Hopefully, this event will kickstart some more growers and push Durango a little further in that direction.”