Feb. 14, 2009 — Valentine's Day may be the day for lovers, but it was also the first day of the 38th annual Agriculture and Food Fair, and thousands of food lovers crowded the St. Croix fair grounds at the Schulterbrander Agriculture Complex to take part in the opening.
There were bands, of course, and things for kids to play on, and dancers and speakers and vendors of all kinds of goods — from handcrafted art and clothes to the ubiquitous Obama T-shirts, and buyers crowded around the scores of booths, looking at wares, listening to explanations of solar systems, looking at displays about the future of agriculture prepared by local schoolchildren, and even signing up for library cards.
But the Ag Fair is mostly about food — growing it, preparing it and eating it. And on the first day of the 2009 fair, there was no dearth of things to eat — either cooked and served from booths, or raw and ready to take home and prepare.
At the booth of the Virgin Islands Farmers Cooperative, Ray Hamilton was only to happy to talk about why fresh, locally grown produce is always going to be better and healthier than food shipped to the islands from the mainland.
Tomatoes, even those grown in the relatively nearby state of Florida, have to be picked early and treated so they don't spoil in transit. Then they're packed, put in a container that gets loaded onto a ship that brings them to the island.
"These," he said, pointing to the glowing red globes in the co-op's stand, "were picked yesterday."
While large-scale agribusinesses have to grow varieties adapted for long shelf-life and hardiness to ensure they survive shipping, local farmers can concentrate on growing vegetable varieties bred for taste.
And the local farmer can do it without relying on heavy use of toxic pesticides and herbicides, he added, making locally grown produce healthier as well as tastier.
Hamilton, the marketing director of the co-op, said the group now has 83 members growing fresh produce for the local market.
Cathy Weikel and Tammy Zolner stopped to look over the co-op produce and ended up discussing bok choy with co-op member Yvette Browne, who discussed varieties with them for several minutes before getting back to business. The interaction directly between farmer and the ultimate consumer of the produce, selling produce you've grown directly to the people who will eat it, is part of what makes the Ag Fair special.
"It's fun," Browne said. "You meet people from all over."
In the livestock barn, fairgoers browsed among "food on the hoof" — pens of sheep and goats, cages of chickens both exotic and normal, and pigs the size of small sofas.
And permeating the air of the fairgrounds and hundreds of feet in every direction, was the smell of cooking food — the pates and johnny cakes and other delectable Crucian specialties, mixed with Asian food, barbecue and the more prosaic fried varieties of carnival fare — including of course the massive bundles of spun sugar known as cotton candy.
The fair continues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday and Monday.
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