In a chilly storeroom piled high with fall produce, Jimena Cordero is chopping up vegetables and fanning them out onto trays.

Cordero is the farm manager at Ollin Farms, not far from Boulder, Colo. — she’s put together bright pink and purple radishes, apple, fresh turnips.

“This is a green luobo,” she explains, as she expertly cuts the oblong radish into rounds.

These locally grown vegetables aren’t just pretty. They’re being prepared to make a case to state lawmakers at a meeting later that afternoon.

“You can have a super colorful veggie tray for a meeting, and everybody can get on the same vibration, eating the same good, healthy food,” says Cordero’s dad, Mark Guttridge, who started this farm with his wife, Kena, 17 years ago.

That vibration and the good, healthy food are part of the case Guttridge wants to make that farmers can play an important […]