Harvest Blogger's Tour 2012

For the 2nd year, Franklin County Tourism, Franklin County Farm Bureau and Latham Hi-Tech Seeds, hosted a Harvest Blogger's Tour.  This year's Harvest Tour took place over this past weekend and had bloggers from Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and New Hampshire.  This is a great opportunity to showcase Franklin County, Iowa from agriculture, to entertainment, to great food!  There are two requirements of the bloggers that participate:

1. They must find a way to get themselves to Hampton, Iowa for the weekend.
2. They must blog about their experiences.

If they do those two things, the entire weekend (Friday-Sunday) is taken care of for them - lodging, food, entertainment, etc.  A few things the bloggers did over the weekend this year include going on a tour of the Old Stone House, toured the REA plant, went star gazing while sampling wine from a local winery (Town's End Winery), went on a tour of the Franklin County Historical Society Museum and Grandpa's Farm, went shopping in downtown Hampton, went to the Windsor Theater for a live Vaudeville show, and participated in the Harriman-Nielsen Historic Farm Fall Festival.

I was happy to be able to join the group for awhile on Saturday while they focused on agriculture.  To start with, the group traveled to Latham Hi-Tech Seeds and heard from the North Central Iowa Ag in the Classroom staff about the program, as well as went through a couple of the lessons that they do for kids in local schools.

Ag in the Classroom

Then the group went on a tour at Latham's.  Following the tour, the group went to the Roy Arend's Farm, where they got to go on tractor and combine rides.

Blogger group with the Roy Arend's Farm Family

It was great to interact with the bloggers.  They had a lot of great questions about agriculture in Iowa.  The Harvest Blogger's Tour is a great opportunity to not only promote tourism to Franklin County and Iowa, but it is a great chance to spread the messages of agriculture to new audiences through the bloggers followers.

I can't wait to see what results from this year's Harvest Blogger's Tour and I can't end this post without linking my requested Sweet & Spicy Hog Wild Baked Beans recipe!