A Farm to Table Harvest Dinner is coming up this Thursday, October 10th. Patrick Skates and Melinda Nelson were guests on a recent Open Line program and Patrick explained what Farm to Table is all about and how the idea came about…
“A friend of mine, who I got to know from Young Leader Committee on Farm Bureau, when I served on that, had done it in his county and city. They had put together a Farm to Table Dinner and more or less blocked off the street and made a whole long table down the street. The first year they had 150 people. The next year they had about 400 people that wanted to come. It looked like a great community event to me and so that’s kind of where the idea came from. Melinda and a few of us got together and started talking more about it and the event was born out of that. Then we went to the City Council to get approval for it.”
Scates expanded on his story about why he feels it is important for our community to host this type of event…
“Again, I’ve seen other communities do it and then talking with my friend, who had posted it on facebook, it became an annual event that they are doing. His idea came from talking to an older gentleman in town who said he used to know everyone in town back in 1980 something. He said the funny part about it was there were a thousand less people in town now and he doesn’t know everyone. He [Patrick’s friend] said what we wanted to do was have more community events and he said you may go to this event and get seated next to someone you might normally walk past in a grocery store and not have anything to talk about. Now that you got seated next to her or him, you might have that in common and strike up a conversation in the small community that we are in. That was kind of the idea of why we were doing it and as we talked more about it we thought why not raise money for a good cause and help promote agriculture and ag related businesses in our county and our community.”
Melinda went on to paint a picture of what the event will look like and what will be served at the dinner…
“We will have 20 tables lined up with hopes for 200 to 250 guests. We’ll have 5 tables for food and we are looking forward to a wonderful event. Unlike the traditional Farm to Table, this year, we were hoping to kickstart it off with Corn Day, since this is the first year for White County. We thought, ‘What a great way to celebrate that with the kickstart to Corn Day.’ We are having some local caterers, this year, involved with this aspect of it, because next year our plan is to have a true Farm to Table event, so we will be having local growers and things. This year we wanted the timeline to be more during harvest season and not during actual produce time. We have been very lucky that we have local caterers here in our community that are great with things. Little Giant is going to be catering our meat items for that. The pork chops and chicken will be coming from them. Yesterday’s will be providing the sides for us and Two Chicks and a Spoon will be providing the deserts. Huck’s is donating some drinks to us as well.”
There will two different ticket prices. A $40 ticket will allow folks to socialize before the dinner and will include appetizers as well as the meal. The social hour begins at 5:30 pm. A $30 ticket is for the meal only. The dinner begins at 6:30 pm. Tickets can be purchased at People’s National Bank, Scates Valley Irrigation, and the White County Farm Bureau. Proceeds will benefit the White County 4-H Clubs. They are hoping to make this an annual event with proceeds benefiting different organizations each year.
For additional details call 618-968-2471. Again, the Farm to Table Harvest Dinner will begin with a social hour at 5:30 pm (special ticket required) and the meal will be served at 6:30 pm, Thursday, October 10th, on South Main Cross between the Castle and Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Carmi.
