Lots of the fruits and vegetables sold at farmers markets and roadside farmstands throughout the upper Midwest were purchased by the vendors at the Benton Harbor Fruit Market, in Benton Harbor, Michigan, according to the New York Times. The story observed:
“That might come as a surprise to food shoppers who deliberately trek to places like Perrysburg, Ohio; Fennville, Mich.; or LaPorte, Ind., expecting that they are buying directly from the farmer. But many of those vendors no longer have the ability or inclination to stock their stalls by themselves."
Benton Harbor is “the buckle of the fruit belt,” in the heart of a region that leads the nation in production of more than a dozen crops. The 147-year-old market is “the world's largest ‘cash-to-grower’ wholesale produce market,” with over 1,000 farm families registered to sell their produce at the 25-acre facility. Small local farmers have been a fixture at the market since it was founded in 1860, but these days, they’re odd fellows out:
“A number of farmers who sell at Benton Harbor own family farms that are just big enough to stay in business. They lack the acreage or the production power of the big corporate farms who sell to distributors with familiar supermarket names, like Dole, Driscoll or Del Monte. Although Benton Harbor has 1,000 farmers registered to sell here, only about 70 arrived on a recent summer Friday, to sell to a similar number of customers.”
The main customers for the small-scale producers are vendors who will resell the produce at farmers markets and farm stands -- after marking it up as much as 100 percent. Many of the ultimate customers won't be aware of that.
Why can’t the farmers who sell at the Benton Harbor Fruit Market take their produce to farmers markets and sell it themselves? Some do, but many say they can’t spare the time and expense to cart their produce every day to markets all over the place. They’re farmers, after all, and can't spend all their time marketing. It's better for them if intermediaries carry their produce to farmers markets. But is it better for consumers? Not if they're left ignorant of the fact that they're buying from resellers.
Many farmers markets quite reasonably allow limited reselling. If the reselling is limited and tightly regulated, and the reseller bought it directly from local farmers, and it is clearly identified as resold produce, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. But consumers definitely want to and deserve to know, as a reseller interviewed by the Times reporter at the Benton market acknowledged:
"Rose Moser, of Perrysburg, Ohio, said the shoppers at her farm market outside Toledo had come to expect her to carry top-quality fruit, grown close by. 'More and more, they want to know where it came from,' said Ms. Moser, who was making the three-hour trip home with blueberries and peaches."
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