Chaos at the Farmers’ Market

This story in the Wall Street Journal about a farmers’ market debate that is raging (can anything really rage at a farmers’ market?) in Wisconsin and across the country reminds me how much is wrong with how we choose our food. It reports that even our best alternative to supermarkets, our closest approximation to traceability in our food supply, can’t provide us the assurances we ask of it. Meanwhile, some half-cocked ideas are floating around about how to make farmers’ markets stricter, less accessible, and heavier on bureaucracy and process.

Who needs more of that, especially farmers? Cross checking seed receipts to verify that a farmer grew what he is peddling, inspecting farms to make sure they’re growing what they said they were, lots of pencil and paper work overseen by resource-constrained market managers? How in the world can this be the extent of our food alternatives? There must be a better way to get the comfort we receive from believing that a real farmer grew real food that we browse while a country music cover band takes us back to another time, when people had no choice but to farm.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must say that I shop at my neighborhood’s Saturday market when I can. But I don’t enjoy it for anything but the outcome: a great selection of fresh foods in which I have a higher degree of confidence than I do in food I get from the grocery store. I think the farmers’ market is just about the least efficient way to get our food (and research from Cornell Cooperative Extension suggests that it is just about the least efficient way to sell food too), much less gain transparency into how that food was produced. If you’re lucky, you’ll actually get to talk to the farmer when you show up at the farm stand. But if the farmer is successful, she will be selling at multiple markets on the same Saturday morning, reducing your chances of meeting the woman with the dirt under her fingers. If she’s really successful, her sunny day will be better spent on the farm.

At the heart of this debate are questions about what a farmers’ market should be, what it turns out to be, and who gets to decide. For some, the farmers’ market is about community, an opportunity to socialize with neighbors and farmers, a pastime. For others, both buyers and sellers, it is business. Still, direct sales of food from farmer to consumer represented just 1.1% of food purchases in the US in 2009.

Two recent articles published in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems discuss research that shows that even though consumers pay significant premiums on farmers’ market produce, if labor costs are taken into account farmers are only slightly better off selling at farmers’ markets, if they are better off at all. An article on Grist suggests that New York State farmer Morse Pitts has no long-term incentive to continue selling at the Union Square Farmers’ Market. By Pitts’ calculations, he makes just $7 an hour selling at the market, even though his customers pay a pretty penny to buy greens directly from him.

Furthermore, markets suffer from both consumer and farmer upward mobility. As Salon reports, farmers in Lancaster County that could gain access to higher-paying Philadelphia markets chose to go there instead of continuing with a community food access project in their own county. Isn’t that the rational thing to do? The problem is that consumers in small towns and communities with lower ability and willingness to pay are not just economically but also geographically excluded from the market for direct-from-farm food. If we could resolve the geographic boundaries of transacting in fresh food, as we've done with markets for commodities, perhaps we could achieve better equality of access.

Some farmers that sell at market do gain a lot from interacting with customers. They hear about what people like, what they don’t, how they’re using the produce. They get some satisfaction from meeting their loyal customers, from educating people new to the market, and from spending time with peer farmers. Is there a way to retain the good in farmers’ markets – the community, the interaction, the access to an array of (what we think is) farms’ fresh produce – but gain insight into the authenticity and quality of farms and food, the mystery of which has caused this Wisconsin tiff?

The farmers’ market fills a true need that is underscored by data from the USDA that shows the number of markets in the US has nearly doubled in the last eight years. So, the market brings us something that nothing else does yet: an array of fresh, whole food the source of which we generally trust; a choice in what quantities and assortment of that food we want; direct contact between farms and consumers. I spend my days thinking about a better way to accomplish this, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.


This piece also appears at Zocalo.