Recap: 2026 Eat Local First Trade Meeting
On the morning of February 10th, Aaron Straight, Tammy Woodrich, Rich Appel, and Chris Elder opened the 2026 Sustainable Connections Eat Local First Trade Meeting — NW Washington's largest food and farm business conference — with a question most conferences don't start with: What becomes possible when stories and relationships come first?
To a room of more than 180 farmers, fishers, chefs, buyers, and food producers, they talked honestly about the Nooksack watershed — the adjudication, the shared stakes, the slow work of trust-building across old divides. Tammy brought an indigenous storyteller's perspective. Rich brought 40 years of farming the valley. Chris brought the long view of conservation planning. Aaron held the thread.
It was an unusual opening for a trade conference. But that's the point. These aren't separate conversations.
