As in other communities, Shelby County is seeing a renewed interest in local foods, homegrown food production and small farming. The county has seen steady growth in land ownership in the 1-49 acre range and farms reporting sales in the $1-$2500 range numbered 656 in 2012.  To support these new farmers, and to allowing networking among new and existing farmers, the Hort & Ag Advisory Council formed Rooted in Shelby in 2014.  Rooted in Shelby is a program designed to promote the sale of horticultural, agricultural and other products produced by Kentucky proud enterprises located in Shelby County.  The main goal of Rooted in Shelby is to build a network between farmers, producers and consumers, promoting the use of Shelby County products.

In order to assist producers of local foods in expanding their marketing skills and reach, the Shelby County Ag and Hort program offered a two-session Direct Marketing workshop utilizing materials from the Center for Crop Diversification’s Marketing for All program.  Brett Wolff with CCD and Kati Bowman with KCARD educated participants on topics including Marketing Basics, Using Price Data to Make More Money, Hands-on Visual Merchandizing and Record Keeping for Specialty Crops.

24 producers learned new practices to help them build their local foods businesses.  According to post-program surveys, 2/3 of the participants learned three or more practices relative to marketing and pricing during the first session.  In the second session, 41% of participants learned five or more new practices relative to visual merchandizing and record keeping.  100% of respondents in both sessions indicated that the material would be somewhat or very useful to their businesses and that the quality of the program content was either good or very good.

Program participants were given the opportunity to rank topics in the Marketing for All curriculum for inclusion in future workshops