Lyn Jerde/Daily Register
Phil Hazard puts together a half-bushel of Macintosh apples for a customer at Sunday's Savor and Sample Fest. Like most of the food available at the event, Hazard's apples, in numerous varieties, were produced in Columbia County -- in this case, in a town of Leeds orchard.

For Portage Daily Register video from the festival, click here.

Columbia County loca-vores - people who eat mainly foods produced near their homes - need not confine their diets to beef, cheese, milk and corn.

Nowhere was that shown more clearly than at a cooking demonstration at Sunday's Savor and Sample Fest in the county's town of Hampden, where samples of fresh pasta sauce went faster than you could say, "Pass the pepper."

"It had chopped tomatoes, garlic, basil, parsley, oregano, Parmesan cheese and olive oil - and everything but the olive oil came from Columbia County," said Becky Gutzman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Nutrition Education Program for the University of Wisconsin-Extension Columbia County.

"We chopped it all up, let it simmer, then put it on pasta," she said, "and it was so fresh and light-tasting, not heavy like a lot of pasta sauces get."

The pasta sauce was only one of many foods available for sampling at the Savor and Sample Fest, the first event of its kind in Columbia County. It was held at the Sassy Cow Creamery just outside of Columbus, to showcase locally grown foods and promote the economic and health benefits of buying food from a farmer who's also a neighbor.

Several hundred people came to the free event.

John Priske, whose Fountain Prairie Farms near Fall River long has been a source of locally produced beef, said these days just before the start of fall are an ideal time to showcase local foods, because so many of them are in season now.

"This is a watershed event for us," he said. "We are on the precipice of encouraging people to be loca-vores - having them know where and how their food is produced, and showcasing the bounty of our county."

The Savor and Sample Fest included booths where locally grown foods were offered for sale; tours (in a tractor-drawn hay wagon) of the dairy farm of James and Robert Baerwolf, owners of Sassy Cow; and games for children, including painting miniature pumpkins and building a table-top toy Holstein herd.

Amid all this activity, Rich Fotes of Greek Acres Farm near Cambria sold some beef, some sausage - and some goat.

Seventy-five percent of the world's people eat goat, said Fotes, whose nine-acre farm includes about 80 head of Boer goats, plus a few Angora goats whose product is fiber, not meat.

Inevitably, goat has started to catch on in Wisconsin. Columbia County ranks fourth among Wisconsin's counties in the production of sheep and goats.

Fotes sells much of his goat meat at a farmers market in Waukesha.

"People from India like the stew meat, so for them it has to be cubed," he said. "The Mexicans buy the organ meat. And health-conscious Americans are buying the chops and steaks, because they're lower in fat and cholesterol than white meat chicken."

In the booth adjacent to the Greek Acre Farms display, Phil Hazard put together a half-bushel box of Macintosh apples for a customer who was looking for a good apple variety to use in making apple sauce.

Each fall, Hazard sells about 300 bushels of apples, in 10 to 12 varieties, grown on his orchard in Columbia County's town of Leeds.

It's been a good season for apples, he said, because the recent dry spell came late in the growing season rather than early.

"Everybody has apples this year," he said. "As apple years go, we had a real dry summer two years ago, and that hurt us a lot for that year and the next year, too."

Hazard said his late grandfather, Ray, and his late uncle, Howard, are proof that small apple growers can make a living.

"They'd take their apples to little stores all around Madison," he said. "It was hard work. Apples are a food that a farmer can make a living on. But they need cold storage and good outlets."

Fotes said his farm, which also includes 30 acres of hay for livestock, has begun to prosper in the last few years.

In addition to selling his meat at farmers markets, he also has several Madison restaurants as customers.

"It takes some marketing and work," he said, "but we sell the mohair, we sell the meat, we sell the breeding stock. In the last couple years, it's started to pay for itself."

ljerde@capitalnewspapers.com

745-3587