Events

Agave Heritage Festival

Agave Heritage Festival began in 2008 as Agave Fest, a Cinco de Mayo celebration featuring tequila tastings and a tequila “Iron Bar Chef” competition at the historic Hotel Congress. As the festival grew in the following years, the number of different agave spirits featured at the event more than doubled, and food specials were elevated from cheap eats to regionally focused culinary treats.

By 2015 — the same year that Tucson was the first U.S. city to receive the UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation — Agave Fest had gone from a tequila-lover’s Cinco de Mayo celebration to an event rooted in the historical and cultural significance of the agave plant. With seminars, a fundraising Agave Dinner, tastings of spirits unavailable in the United States, and a cultural and historical art exhibit, Agave Fest had begun to realize its true potential.

The agave plant’s inextricable role in the culture and history of the Arizona-Mexico borderlands region became a central focus of Agave Fest, leading to the creation of Agave Heritage Week in 2016 and the expansion into Agave Heritage Festival in 2017.

Today, Agave Heritage Festival is a city-wide, ten-day destination event that spotlights the sustainability of the southwest region through the lens of the agave plant. Agave Heritage Festival celebrates the unique importance of the agave plant and the borderlands culture with seminars, trade shows, and world-class culinary events.

See: https://www.agaveheritagefestival.com/

Arizona Food & Farm Forum • Keynote • Food from the Radical Center

The Arizona Food & Farm Forum is a conference for producers, food entrepreneurs, and local food advocates, programmed to change the way our desert state feeds itself. The event features networking sessions, nationally-acclaimed keynote speakers, instructional workshops, and the opportunity to grow your local food community.

Click here for tickets, sponsorship opportunities, and program details.

The Farm at Agritopia
3000 East Ray Road
Gilbert, AZ, 85296
United States

Gary Paul Nabhan

A first-generation Lebanese American, Nabhan has been working with, and learning from farmers and foragers in several indigenous communities on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border for over thirty years.

Co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH and numerous other key organizers in the southwest, Nabhan currently serves as the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Southwestern Borderlands Food and Water Security at the University of Arizona Southwest Center.

Join Nabhan as he presents success stories from Arizona, highlighting how working for a healthier food system is one of the few goals that bridge the many divides in America today, by uniting urban and rural, left and right, immigrant and indigenous, producer and consumer in ways that build lasting collaborations.