Proctor Peppers 4-H Club opens annual Palisade peach sale

The Proctor Peppers 4-H Club opened its annual Palisade peach sale June 19, giving Logan County residents a chance to buy a familiar Colorado summer fruit while supporting a local youth program rooted at Caliche. The club’s sale is tied to Bonnie Amen, who is listed as the contact at (970) 580-8212, and to a group that meets on the first Monday of the month, underscoring that this is a standing Logan County organization, not a one-time promotion.

For buyers, the appeal is straightforward: the money stays close to home, and the peaches carry the weight of a community tradition. Logan County Extension says it exists to strengthen families, farms and communities through education and resources, and the local 4-H program connects youth to that broader mission through agriculture, responsibility and service. In that sense, each box sold helps sustain one of the county’s long-running youth pipelines while keeping a recognizable Western Slope product in front of local families as peach season begins.

The sale also sits inside a much larger 4-H network. Colorado 4-H says the program reaches about 100,000 young people in the state each year and supports leadership, STEM, agriculture and civic engagement through hands-on learning and mentorship. Nationally, 4-H describes itself as America’s largest youth development organization, serving nearly six million youth. That scale helps explain why a modest fundraiser in Logan County matters: it feeds a local club while reinforcing a statewide and national system that has long depended on community volunteers and small-town buy-in.

The timing was especially meaningful this year. Western Slope growers spent April fighting freezes with fires, wind machines and sprays to protect orchards, and peaches account for about 75% of Colorado fruit production. Colorado’s 2023 peach sales ranked fourth nationally at 15,600 tons, and the industry averaged about $26.7 million a year from 2014 to 2023. With the Palisade Peach Festival set for Aug. 21-22 at Riverbend Park, the sale also tapped into a fruit crop that still anchors the region’s identity and economy, making every local order part of a bigger story about agriculture, risk and community resilience.