If your weekend plans don’t involve sweating it out at the Jackson County Fair over batches of battered-and-fried snacks, a Medford farm and Eagle Point fixture are hosting visitors Saturday for a day of local history and food.
Dunbar Farms on Pierce Road and Butte Creek Mill are stops on the first of Ashland Food Co-op’s annual summer farm tours. There are still spaces for 10 participants on the seven-hour tour, which includes charter-bus transportation and a picnic lunch of farm-fresh foods for $40 per person ($35 for Co-op owners). Call 541-482-2237 to sign up. The tour leaves the Co-op at 8 a.m. and returns at 3:30 p.m.
Small-scale production of grains is the focus of this event. At Dunbar, David Mostue and his farm crew have been growing wheat for the past two years. His unusual approach — covered in a 2009 story for the newspaper’s Oregon Healthy Living magazine — centers around actual horsepower with draft teams instead of motorized farm equipment. Tour participants will meet the American Belgians, Beth and Breeze, who work Dunbar and then observe a threshing demonstration.
Lunch on the farm features food from the farm — wheat-berry, garbanzo and vegetable salad, as well as SunStone Artisan Bakery bread baked from the farm’s wheat flour. A tour follows of the circa-1870s Eagle Point mill, which has started processing local wheat crops to produce Hanley Farm Horsepower Flour and other products.
Registration opens Aug. 2 for the second tour, scheduled for the same time, for the same fee, on Aug. 21, at Blue Fox Farm in Applegate, Mama Terra Micro Creamery near Williams and Rolling Hills Family Farm in west Medford for its peaches. Groups meet first at the Co-op.
And if you’re interested in the challenges of bringing local foods like these into school lunch programs, check out the Co-op’s community forum today at 7 p.m. with Ashland School District’s new food-service manager, Gema Soto. Three other panelists, Tracy Harding from Rogue Valley Farm to School, Eva Skuratowicz of Ashland School Board and Eric Sandrock of the middle school’s garden, join Soto for the discussion. The free event is in the Co-op’s community classroom, 195 A St.
