Truly Local

Farmers Keep Con Artists Out of Grower-Only Markets

On a recent trip, I visited farmers markets in two cities – Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, Canada – where some farmers and market managers have put up a good fight in the last several years to create real farmers markets, which is to say places where actual, local farmers sell the produce that they grew on their own farms.

Truly Local has previously reported on the efforts in both Carlisle and Toronto to chase peddlers out of markets, and failing that, to create new grower-only markets operating under clear-cut rules designed to exclude peddlers of wholesale produce.

I found that grower-only markets in both cities are alive and well, and I reported on my findings for Seasonal Chef. Click on over to read my recent farmers market reports from Carlisle and Toronto.

Farmers Play 2nd Fiddle at Carlisle ‘Farmers Market’

The Carlisle Central Farmers Market, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is on the verge of imploding less than two years after it began. The cause: a possibly irreconcilable conflict between farmers and non-farmers.
 
According to a report about the market’s demise by Joseph Cress in the Sentinel Reporter, the non-farmers think farmers have way too much clout. But farmers complain that the venue is mostly a farmers market in name only, which is more concerned with redeveloping downtown Carlisle than providing an outlet where local farmers can sell locally produced food.

The evidence suggests that the disgruntled farmers have more cause for complaint. To begin with, there are no farmers on the market’s board of directors. Board President David Sheridan, oddly enough, seems to think that would be a conflict of interest.

However, as Sandra Kay Miller, who owns Painted Hand Farm in Newburg, explained, input from farmers could have averted some boneheaded management decisions, starting with the plan to keep the market open on two back-to-back days each week, Friday and Saturday. “That’s fine for people who don’t have farms. But I have 150 animals I need to take care of,” said Miller, who recently withdrew from the market in frustration.

Miller said the farmers proposed having a market on Tuesday or Wednesday as well as on Saturday, to better accommodate mid-week shoppers and the agricultural production cycle. But they were ignored. Farmers also suggested scaling back the market to Saturdays during the slow winter months, Miller said. That proposal likewise was ignored.

Several non-farmer vendors at the market told Cress they couldn’t understand what the farmers are grumbling about. Ted Loy, owner of Ted’s Oven Ready Foods, for one, insisted that there has been too much emphasis on local growers at the market. In another recent article in the Sentinel Reporter, Melissa Colucci, agreed. Colucci, who resells “hand-made jewelry” at a stall in the market, blamed the board for pushing a “personal agenda” that favors organic, grass-fed meat but bars resellers. “They were warned by multiple people that they were going in the wrong direction, and they completely ignored it,” she said, apparently meaning that the board should let the market turn into a free-for-all flea market.

Sheridan insists there is room in the market for both local growers and resellers. Local growers alone couldn’t cover the rent for 7,800-square-foot indoor facility occupied by the market, he says. The association’s Web site, however, clearly seeks to hitch the venue’s wagon to the local food fad that is sweeping the nation, and offers no hint that any reselling is allowed. As the market’s “mission statement” declares, the venue will be a “destination to showcase our region’s bounty…and to provide entrepreneurial opportunities for those who produce and sell local products.”

That would suit Miller fine, if only the mission statement were truly put into effect. “The bottom line is, without the farmers, it’s not a farmers market,” she said. “That’s what it says over the door. People go there to buy food.”

Local-Only Brouhaha in Pennsylvania

The borough council in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, unanimously passed an ordinance in April aimed at making at least one of the two farmers markets in town live up to its name. The Saturday market would be a venue where farmers would sell directly to consumers only produce they had actually grown, the council declared.

The town’s Wednesday market would continue operating, as both markets had for years, as a “farmers market” in name only. There, vendors peddling wholesale produce would be free to continue swindling those shoppers who are drawn to the venue under the impression that they’re buying fresh-picked produce direct from local farms.

Some peddlers in Bellefonte are outraged at the infringement on their rights, and a sympathetic local politician has vowed to undo the rule. In the meantime, a reporter from the Centre Daily Times, in State College, Penn., discovered on a visit to the Saturday market that some peddlers have been brazenly defying the law.

“Gary Horner, of Spring Mills, has been selling vegetables and fruits at the market since 1972, and he says the changes have touched off an atmosphere of jealousy among the vendors. ‘It's not like it was,’ he says of the convivial market he remembers.

“Horner [claims that he] grows some of the produce -- cabbage, cucumbers, zucchini and onions -- but the peaches, melons and beets that often fill his tables he gets from other sources, and so, technically, he shouldn't be offering them on Saturdays. But he still does, pointing out there's no way for the borough to police the farms. Plus, he says, his customers look for certain things both in and out of season. ‘If they're good tomatoes, customers don't care,’ he said. ‘They want what they want’.”

As if on cue, a customer chimed in to insist that Horner's produce is the best at the market. But other shoppers told the reporter that they patronized the market because they wanted to know where their food came from and because they wanted to support local farmers.

A clueless councilman, Joe Beigle, is dead set on eliminating the ‘producer-only’ restriction at the market. He complained that keeping peddlers out of the markets drives prices up and sends vendors to other markets.

Actually, allowing cut-rate, out-of-season wholesale produce into “farmers markets” drives the real farmers out and the quality down. And it leaves well-intentioned shoppers who get wind of the scam feeling like they’ve just been robbed.