The Harvested Here Festival will be held in downtown Hillsboro around the courthouse on Saturday, Aug. 24 from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
The festival will include local vendors selling locally grown and locally produced products. The event will also feature food trucks and tastings of beer, wine, moonshine and other distilled spirits.
Dan Gray started the nonprofit Farm to Bottle Foundation to support and organize local events like the Harvested Here Festival and bring awareness to local products.
“Basically, I’ve been involved with Rock the Block in Wilmington – a big concert they do up there every year, and last year I started a festival in Wilmington called the Farm to Bottle Festival, and it went over fairly well,” Gray said. “Through that, I started a nonprofit organization called the Farm to Bottle Foundation.”
Gray said he started the foundation to provide entertainment to the community and bring attention so some small businesses and local farmers.
“The closer to Highland County the better, but I’m not going to exclude other counties,” he said.
“For the Farm to Bottle Festival last year, the concept I had was to bring growers, producers, and consumers together in one spot so a person can come in and they can follow the path of how a seed that is planted in the ground becomes an ear of corn, and that corn is processed to make some kind of a distilled spirit,” Gray said. “Basically it’s a farming focused thing, and that one is more geared toward the alcohol industry.”
He said the Harvested Here Festival will include all types of agricultural products.
“The kind of stuff we’re looking for is just the small local farmer that has good products that you can trust and that’s not over-commercialized,” he said.
Much of the festival has been sponsored by the local Fraternal Order of Eagles, and it is free to attend and free for vendors.
“The Harvested Here Festival is very much right there in what the title says – stuff that’s harvested here in this local area by the small farmers and the small businesses that sell those farmer’s products,” he said. “We’ve got a few different people around here that do honey, and we’ve got some maple syrup places – just anything that would come from a small local farm or person that can be sold here locally.”
Music at the festival will be performed by Dirty Deeds (an AC/DC tribute band from Cleveland), Skinny Molly, Missing November, AR6, Sick Serenity and Charlie Bonnet III.
“It’s just like a super long extended farmers market with a bunch of our people,” Gray said.
Reach John Hackley at 937-402-2571.
