Watauga County, North Carolina

want to locate in the High Country, Watauga County works with the State of North Carolina, which offers a range of incentives and grant programs. “Our part in that is coordinating with the state,” says Furman. “We’ll do that on behalf of partners in the private sector. The County, in the past, has provided a healthy range of incentives and is willing to negotiate those with potential partners. We don’t have a formal incentive package in that sense, but we’re certainly willing to discuss those. We look at it the same way the state does – we want to see an investment in the community and we want to see jobs created and maintained.” An investment the County has made in a local organization – and one that has grown exponentially due to the COVID-19 pandemic - is the High Country Food Hub. “It’s an online marketplace for local meat and vegetables produced by local farmers,” says Furman. “The Economic Development Commission believes that’s very important and invested in that twice. After the first investment, the Food Hub doubled its business in a year. And I think it’s about five times bigger now, because of people preferring to shop that way instead of going to a store. Once the pandemic is over, I’m sure they’ll lose some of that business, but I’m sure they’ll keep a good portion of it, too. So, within the last year-and-a-half, the Food Hub has become a very important and viable contributor to the economy.” “It’s a non-profit, run by a group called Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture,” Jackson explains. “They saw a way to centralize product distribution and a way to expand freezer space and storage space for local farmers so that they could move some of that product and have a centralized location to operate out of and get those products to customers, rather than having them drive all over the county looking for these farms and trying to source all that stuff themselves. There’s a central location right in the center of downtown Boone and that stuff goes out every Wednesday. You drive there, you