On May 4, 2023, one of my employees and I attended the annual North Dakota Farmers’ Market and Growers Association local foods conference in Bottineau. When we arrived at the hotel on schedule, nobody else was there.

The following morning people started to trickle in, but overall, the conference was poorly attended.
The venue for the conference, Dakota College, was just the right place, but the timing was completely off. That’s the very weekend that most vegetable producers in North Dakota begin their spring planting.

Several weeks after the conference, the North Dakota Farmers’ Market and Growers Association board of directors elected me as their president for the next year. So ever since the end of May, myself and several others having been working hard to re-brand the NDFMGA.

I didn’t realize the depth of the issues until I dug into them. Several things happened nearly simultaneously that caused the association to falter. Our executive director passed away. Our liaison with the North Dakota Department of Agriculture left the department and a new executive director who was hired, was on staff less than a year and quit.

In addition, for several years we partnered with the North Dakota Grape and Wine Association to split costs of putting on a statewide conference. Then, we partnered with Pride of Dakota. I’m not going to sugarcoat this, because I’m pretty sure those partnerships really affected our identity.

So, after the election, the vice-president and I had numerous phone conversations to talk about what we were going to do. We explored a lot of ideas and some of them went to the board for approval.

The first thing we did as a board, was hire an executive director. We picked someone who knows farmers’ markets, knows vegetable production and knows a lot of people across North Dakota. His name is Keith Knudson, a retired instructor from Dakota College.

The second thing we did was to begin working on an annual conference that we promised from the get go would be held earlier in 2024 and would have more to offer.

Third, we agreed that we exist for our members and we have to do a better job to help, educate and represent. After all, membership has to have some value.

Fast forward to late December. Our conference committee, including our new liaison with the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, met to close out the year. At that time, we all agreed that we feel good about what’s coming in 2024.
We’ve scheduled the local foods conference for March 21-23 at the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck. We decided we needed a new and exciting venue and we got it.

Once we got the Heritage Center booked, we started looking for speakers and demonstrators. They include the USDA, food safety experts, local chefs, a soil health expert, how to successfully market your product and we’ll have a young people’s panel discussion because we strongly believe our panelists will motivate the next generation of farmers’ market vendors.
We also reached out to find a keynote speaker that wouldn’t let us down. We found her in Christy Rost, a chef from Dallas who has been featured on public television and has a show on the Food Network.

And when we started negotiations with Christy, we found out that North Dakota is in the top 10 states of her fan base.
That means two things. No. 1, she is going to be an attendance draw which is why we booked her in the first place. No. 2, a number of her fans are going to get to meet her should they attend the local foods conference. That includes a cookbook signing on March 22.

The six of us on the conference committee having been working hard to make this conference successful and right now, we strongly believe we are on the right track.

As a result, it would behoove anyone who has an interest in local foods, farm to school, farmers’ markets, CSA, Christy Rost or food safety, to attend the conference and see for yourself what’s in store.
More information is available at (https://www.ndfarmersmarkets.org/).