The Lowery Creek Watershed Initiative and Savor the River Valley, partnerships with different but somewhat compatible missions, are reaching out to area residents and visitors in an attempt to help farmers and food producers within the region. They’re planning a “Farm and Food Tour,” monthly field events and a farm-to-table dinner at the Hilltop near Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin – all to bring producers and consumers together.

The Lowery Creek Watershed Initiative’s mission is to protect and nurture soil and water quality, natural areas, viewsheds and cultural resources in the Lowery Creek Watershed. The watershed is an area in Iowa County, Wisconsin, that includes land east and west of Lowery Creek from about 10 miles south of Spring Green to the Wisconsin River.

The watershed project is coordinated by the Driftless Area Land Conservancy. Barb Barzen, community conservation specialist for the organization, said promoting agriculture and food producers and processors in the region makes perfect sense for the group.

“In our initial meetings as a watershed group we decided we wanted to be more oriented toward community building than some other watershed groups might be,” Barzen said. “Many watershed groups are focused technically on water quality, land-management practices and getting farmers to sign up for (the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service) programs. In our group most everybody is already doing really cool stuff on the ground, so it’s more about getting together and encouraging each other and kind of building a brand.”

Mike Degen, the natural-landscape coordinator for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin near Spring Green, lives in the watershed and coordinates field activities for the Lowery Creek Watershed Initiative. He said the group has always been interested in celebrating small-scale agriculture that fits well in the Driftless Area.

“It’s a unique place that has drawn unique people,” he said. “It goes way back to Frank Lloyd Wright, American Players Theatre and House on the Rock – we really just felt the area was something worth celebrating, preserving and nurturing. We gathered a group of like-minded people and said, ‘Let’s be deliberate about the life we live here and see if we can enhance it and set a good example of what it means to live in a community like this.’”

The watershed group decided to make water quality one of its measuring sticks of success, setting up nine water-quality monitoring sites within the watershed and enlisting about 15 volunteers to do monthly sampling. They also began having conversations with organizers of Savor the River Valley to see if there was something they could do together to promote agriculture in the region.

Patti Peltier, a co-founder of Savor the River Valley with Stef Morrill Kerckhoff of River Valley Commons, said the Savor group began discussions with people who were entrepreneurs in the area to determine what could be done to promote community vitality. Several entrepreneurs in the area operated food businesses, so they created the idea of “food tourism” as a way to bring people into the area – to increase revenue for farmers and other food businesses.

“We have Taliesin, we have (the American Players Theatre), we have the river, we have a lot of people who come here,” Peltier said. “We need to feed them. Everybody we talked to said this is something they could get behind.”

The Savor group, founded in 2021, now has more than 40 members. They are farmers, food processors, food retailers and restaurants that are loosely confined within the communities of Spring Green, Plain, Lone Rock and Arena, Wisconsin. There’s no membership fee to be involved in the organization.

They’ve created a “collaborative model” to pool resources and promote activities happening within the region.

“Things within the watershed, things that relate to farming, food and the land – they’re all so interconnected,” she said. “We have a lot of people in our area who are concerned about growing wholesome food and we want to bring more visibility to those businesses. We discovered it wasn’t just outsiders who didn’t know about these things; it was also local people who didn’t know all of the things that were going on.

“We started running some classes that would highlight our members – to teach people how to cook with local ingredients, for example. That evolved into a Savor Winter School where we had a dozen classes between November and March on the weekends to bring some cash flow into these businesses during the winter when the tourists are generally gone. And now we have this Farm and Food Tour, and we have 14 businesses that are doing something special on that day. We are so grateful to Iowa County for giving us a grant to help fund the tour.”

Degen said, “We are helping build awareness of this unique community and the unique life we have going on here.”

Some farms and food businesses in the area that aren’t generally open for tours will be open during the April 20 event, including a flour mill, a coffee roaster, a tortilla maker, a meat plant and a cheese factory.

Meadowlark Farm and Mill near Ridgeway, Wisconsin, is just west of the Lowery Creek Watershed but part of the tour. The business generally wholesales its products; it doesn’t have a retail outlet so the tour will be an opportunity to see the operation behind the scenes. The same goes for Tortilleria Zepeda in Lone Rock, Wisconsin, which makes thousands of corn tortillas every day. It ships them to wholesale customers but doesn’t have a storefront. Peltier said many local residents don’t know about the availability of products from those businesses and others within the region.

“I keep hearing that people in urban areas don’t know where their food comes; they’ve never been around a cow or a chicken,” Peltier said. “Some people are yearning to get in touch with that. We need to let them know we’re here. And we need to let local people know more about what’s here.”

She said collaboration between the watershed and Savor groups is still fresh but makes perfect sense.

“Together we can bring awareness to these local food producers who are marketing what they make,” she said. “We can help consumers become aware of the food that’s being grown around them and seek out where they can get it.”

Dick Cates, a well-known beef grazier from Spring Green, is active in both groups along with his son, Eric Cates. The Cates farm will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 20. The Cates farm, honored as a Leopold Conservation Award winner in 2013, has been the site of one of the watershed initiative’s water-quality monitors for the past six years.

The Cates family sells beef directly to consumers as well as to area restaurants and grocery stores. So they understand the importance of working together and making connections with consumers.

“These efforts are truly inspirational and are lifting the bar for our community, working together for cleaner water and celebrating our farmers, restaurants, millers, bakers and tourism,” Dick Cates said. “We feel we have something of great value worth sharing with rural communities far and wide.

“My family and our community have taken ownership of our future, and by doing so we get to decide what our future looks like.”

Cates said he’s especially proud of the improvements that have been made on their farm to Lowery Creek, which runs through their property in the middle of the watershed. The farm has 25 stream crossings among its 35 pastures. The creek has been classified as a Class 1 trout stream and is home to the greatly valued heritage brook trout. The stream running through the Cates farm is now open for public fishing.

The Lowery Creek Watershed Initiative has a series of monthly workshops about land- and water-conservation topics called “Evenings Afield,” scheduled to start May 2 and run through Oct. 17. Visit www.driftlessconservancy.org/evenings-afield-registration for more information.

The “Savor the River Valley Farm and Food Tour” will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 20. Visit www.savortherivervalley.org/events for more information.