In Edmonton, AB Canada, Potato farmer Gord Visser decided to give away 100,000 pounds of Russet potatoes to raise awareness about local food grown in the northeast corner of Edmonton.
Gordon Visser makes an unlikely barker of the one-day sale. A third-generation farmer in Edmonton's fertile northeast, Visser hawks Russets, not Hide-A-Beds, so he's not normally one for the giveaway deal.
The giveaway is part of a growing Edmonton movement to protect the city's dwindling agricultural land from development. By luring the hordes with the promise of free spuds, Visser hopes to send a lasting message about the value of local grub.
"To invite people out to the land --to see the land, to smell it, to experience it--to ask them to come and support the agriculture in this land without giving them something would be hard to do,"Visser said Tuesday in an interview from his farm off 195th Avenue near the Manning Freeway.
The crowd that showed up for the potato-give away, was greater than anyone could have imagined. Thousands of people showed up to get their share of free potatoes freshly dug from fields at Gordon Visser's farm.
By mid-morning, the potato give-away resulted in a huge traffic jam.
When Becky McFee, her husband and their children got stuck in the traffic jam around 11 a. m., Becky couldn't sit still. She got out of their vehicle and started running toward the farm. "I ran about three miles to get here, because I heard the potatoes were running out,"she said.
She joined a crowd of people picking up potatoes that a mechanical harvester had freed from the soil.
"We dug into the dirt with our hands--it was very soft soil--and picked them up and put them into our bags,"Becky said. "The farmer was wonderful, he was so sweet and so generous. I just need to thank him a hundred times over."
The giveaway was organized by the Greater Edmonton Alliance, the Edmonton Potato Growers and Visser's Norbest Farms. The main idea was to remind people about the importance of protecting agricultural land from residential and other development.
Michael Walters of the Greater Edmonton Alliance, an advocacy group that works to protect local farmland, expressed shock that the free spuds had proved so popular.
"We didn't know they would all go,"Walters said. "We were scheduled to be here until 4 p. m. We couldn't even have imagined this. Obviously, the demand for this food and this land is spectacular."
Walters said people were in remarkably good spirits and were motivated not only by free Russets, but by the movement to protect local food and farmers in Edmonton.
"People weren't just interested in the free potatoes,"he said. "They are interested in how important this land is."
Jensen said he thought the event helped Edmontonians of all ages appreciate that some of their food is grown close to home.
"A lot of kids, if you ask them now, they think that all their potatoes come from Safeway,"he said. "But they come from a farm, and we're fortunate to have some good farmland right here that can produce crops that we'll sell in our local stores."
Photos from a participant at the giveaway.
