3rd Annual Hootenanny!

In our third year, the Friends of the Farmer Festival proved indeed to be one to remember with thousands attending the farm chic FarmFest lakeside in Columbia County NY! The kickoff annual Hootenanny! Farm fresh benefit dinner brought nearly 2800 people to celebrate the family farm with vendors, kids activities and live music performance by Lukas Nelson and POTR sponsored by John Varvatos. Local libations and a Hudson Valley cheese course happy hour were additionally provided by a dozen local farms, creameries, food artisans and producers.

Dinner was prepared by James Beard Awarded Best Chef Northeast Chef Zakary Pelaccio and Jori Jayne Emde of Hudson’s premier farm-to-table restaurant team at Fish & Game; Game Hudson restaurant, some media tagged the “French Laundry of the East”.

50+ local farming families provided the menu’s seasonally inspired ingredients while mixing, mingling and eating together with patrons. When one lucky diner subtly declared that the berries she had just tasted were outrageously delicious the farmer seated next to her responded, “thank you, I grew them,” giving the whole table a jolly laugh.

Hoot! 2013 capped off the evening’s event with another Whole Foods Market sponsored golf cart drive-in movie, “Vanishing of the Bees” preceded by a screening of John Varvatos’ original film, “Willie Nelson & Sons”.

3rd Annual Friends of the Farmer Festival

The next day, 3rd annual Friends of the Farmer Hudson Valley Food Lover’s Festival brought together thousands of future farmers for a wild goose chase, pony rides, hay maze, petting zoo, face painting, seed plantings and other farm-fun events for kids, a locavore village of vendors, five-mile grill, food stands and community food education programs and experiences as well as local libations and a barn to belly mixer Q& A hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension, Stone Barns Center, Wholesome Wave, HV Agro-Business and Hudson Valley Fresh.

Programs

Funds and awareness were raised for FarmOn! Foundation’s youth educational programs which included a 3rd annual year of Camp FarmOn! and the 2nd year of FarmOn! Milk Money program expanded to include three Hudson Valley School Districts in partnership with Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy to bring more nutrition to school lunch and contracts the dairy farm to school lunch. FarmOn!