“Buy local” is both an environmental and an economic policy.
Those who attended the Camp Verde Pecan & Wine festival on April 17 and 18 may have noticed a new feature to the local agriculture that is a fixture of Camp Verde’s annual events. Vendors at the festival, including wineries as well as some local farmers, were among the first in the area to begin selling their wares under the brand “Verde Grown,” featuring its own logo of the state of Arizona, with a sunset, fields and a river coursing through it.
The Verde Grown brand is the fulfillment of a year-long project enacted in cooperation between the Town of Camp Verde, local growers and Local First Arizona to highlight the area’s agriculture, with the help of a grant of $35,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Agriculture is a huge part of our heritage here in Camp Verde, and as such we wanted to really find a way to promote it and to build capacity for our local agricultural producers,” Camp Verde Economic Development Specialist Jessica Bryson told the Camp Verde Town Council at a meeting on Wednesday, May 5.
The program is still in the early phases, having just been rolled out last month, but according to Camp Verde Economic Development Director Steve Ayers, more than 25 local producers have already signed up, with the hope of including more.
“We are currently engaging all of the farmers markets and all of the vendors within each of the farmers markets,” Ayers said. He hopes to also extend the brand to some of the roadside stands in the area, and to eventually give over responsibility to the producers themselves.
The council also heard from Samantha Zah, rural food and sustainability manager for Local First Arizona, who described to the council the ideas behind the marketing push.
“The brand characteristics that the steering committee decided on were primarily stewardship of the Verde River, and the connection of that to agriculture, the culture and heritage of the Verde Valley — being a hardworking community, caring about the ecological integrity, having simple lifestyles, and looking at water-wise growing practices in this very rich, very scenic fertile valley.”
Zah discussed the goal of this branding exercise as benefiting not only producers — through increased exposure, as well as opportunities for future partnerships — but also the wider community of Camp Verde and the rest of the valley, through increased tourism, easier access to locally grown healthy food and business opportunities as well.
