So on October 4, 2025, the Union County Heritage Festival is giving a nod to our agricultural heritage with the theme, “Plowing the fields”. Let's hop on Carl's tractor and tour Wilson Park. At the entrance, take a selfie with Smokey and drill into a log to guess its age. Inspect the Antique cars and pick up a copy of Historic Union County Newspaper. Inside HUC is the program map to guide our tour.
Join us on Saturday, May 22, as the Union County Farmers Market kicks off our Nourish Kids program. This will be the second season that the market has partnered with Nourish Knoxville to present this program. Through a grant, Nourish Knoxville has been able to assist markets like ours throughout East Tennessee, providing materials and Produce Bucks making this program possible.
Everyone enjoys capturing milestones and memories in photographs so that the joy can be relived through the generations.
Here in Union County, KH Equine Event Rentals focuses on the happiness of clients and the take-home factor for moments like these. The creative business offers photo shoot setups and themed shoots as well as the very popular unicorn interaction at shoots and parties.
Tobacco once was a way of life and a tradition. It is where people came from and how they grew up. A lot of hard work and pride went into the crop, but over the years it has become a dying tradition for many reasons, with little remaining in East Tennessee.
Wearing overalls, boots and cowboy hats, the students of Big Ridge Elementary ventured out to the green space and found some fun farm activities as part of the 26th Annual Union County Farm Day on Thursday, September 26. The 250 students made their rounds to 17 stations demonstrating and teaching Ag in the Classroom activities led by more than 40 volunteers.
Farm Day is hosted annually by Union County Farm Bureau, which is putting efforts in to teach the youths of the community the importance of agriculture in their daily lives and give them some knowledge to take home.
Union County Business & Professional Association held its regular Member Meeting on Tuesday, August 13, 2019, at Hardee's in Maynardville. President Martin Shafer called the meeting to order and quickly dispensed with the routine business of the minutes and treasurer's report. The treasurer's report was presented by Gail Corum and as of July 31, 2019, the balance was $5,543.24.
An outdoor farmers market, like the Union County Farmers Market at Wilson Park, is a wonderful place for a family outing. It should be fun for everyone and a fabulous learning experience for your children. The variety of sights, sounds and smells at the market automatically engage your child’s senses and are a fun way to foster curiosity, teach important skills and encourage them to think about where their food comes from. A few ideas to help you get started on a family outing to the market follow.
In rural East Tennessee, throughout history, farming has proven more than just a family tradition for many by providing a livelihood and lifestyle. In Union County, many families have been cultivating the land for generations. In 1958, after five years of marriage, Leonard Padgett Sr. and wife Loretta Graves Padgett, moved with their two young sons, Leonard Jr. (Len) and Wendell, from Rifle Range Road in Knoxville to a portion of the old Beeler farm in Maynardville totaling more than one hundred ten acres, later being titled Cedar Crest Farms.
Raising beef is a very complex business. Knowing how to safely and sustainably run a beef cattle operation is key to profit and success. More Tennesseans are involved in beef production than any other agricultural enterprise. There are 79,000 farms in Tennessee and beef cattle are found on fifty-three percent of those. Tennessee is one of the top beef-producing states in the nation. Our great state ranks ninth in the nation in beef cow numbers and fifteenth in total cattle.
The Tennessee Corn Referendum will be held on Wednesday, November 28 and Thursday, November 29 from 8am - 5pm. The question on the referendum ballot will be “shall the producers of corn assess themselves at the rate of one cent ($0.01) per bushel of corn sold”. If passed, the funds will be paid over to the Tennessee Corn Promotion Board to finance programs of research, education, market development, marketing, advertising and other methods to promote the increased production, consumption, use and sale of corn products.