Truly Local

Key to Wisconsin Market's Success

The Dane County Farmers Market, in Madison, Wisconsin, is one of the biggest in the nation – with 160 to 180 vendors every Saturday -- and is also widely regarded as one of the best.

The key to its success? It is a true farmers market, as the market’s coordinator, Larry Johnson, explained in an interview with a reporter from the Wisconsin State Journal:

“We are one of the largest producer-only markets in the country, and by that I mean that the person behind the table must produce the product and it must be in Wisconsin. We have 160 to 180 vendors every Saturday, and that’s pretty impressive. Some (farmers markets) don’t have the same size, some of them allow a re-sale. We don’t allow any re-sale here at all.”

Peddlers Fight for Right to Hoodwink Consumers

Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Etter has delved into the controversy over whether resellers should be allowed to peddle wholesale produce at so-called farmers markets. Her story begins with a controversy we got wind of three years ago in Tomah, Wisconsin. Farmers who have grown tired of being undersold by peddlers at the local farmers market have finally prodded the City Council to take up the issue. Apparently, the peddlers won’t go without a fight. Ronald Waege, the farmer who is spearheading the drive for a crackdown, said a reseller at the market made “verbal threats to bash my head in” if Waege “didn’t keep his nose out” of the peddler’s business.

The Journal article goes on to report that the Farmers Market Coalition, a national organization based in Martinsburg, W.Va, has assembled a task force to come up with an official definition for a “farmers market.” Stacy Miller, the group’s executive director, tells Etter, “We really need to protect the image of farmers markets as places that foster community, that support local farmers and that provide access points for healthy food in neighborhoods. Without all of those things, is it really a farmers market?”

A 2006 survey of farmers markets conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that only 63% of markets require that “vendors can sell only products they produced themselves.” But as Etter notes, “enforcement can be difficult because markets often are run by municipalities or nonprofits that lack resources for policing and rely on vendors’ honesty.”

In some markets, farmers and consumers are taking matters into their own hands, Etter reports. Luis Vazquez, a farmer who sells at the chair of the commission that oversees the Ann Arbor Farmers Market in Michigan, has lobbied Ann Arbor’s city council to take action against peddlers, and he has picketed the market with a sign saying, “No Faked Goods.” The Journal article also mentions that in Little Rock, Arkansas, as we reported three years ago, a farmer tired of competing with unscrupulous peddlers of out-of-state stuff launched a rival “source-verified” market.

In Tomah, Etter reports, the problem posed by peddlers got out of hand when a wholesale produce auction house opened nearby. Some farmers at the market, who had been selling what they grew for years, suddenly discovered that it was easier to load up their pickup trucks at the auction house than spend months in the hot sun growing it themselves. Better yet, since they could buy surplus stuff on the cheap at the auction, they could undersell the pathetic schmucks at the Tomah “farmers market” who stupidly continued to actually work as farmers.

Ronald Waege, the local farmer who is pushing for a crackdown, complained to the Journal, “We sell four cucumbers for $1 and they sell eight for $1.”

In response, Etter quotes a reseller, John Helming, who is still on the same high horse that we found him on three years ago, when he was defending the peddling of wholesale produce to unsuspecting consumers at farmers market as the free-wheeling-and-dealing American way. Waege is “like a dictator,” trying “to tell you what to grow, what to charge, where you can sell it,” Helming told Etter.

Etter reports that Tomah Mayor John Rusch has proposed a solution: Put resellers on one side of the market and on the other, the farmers that “swear on the Bible they actually grew it.”

'Run the Non-Farmers Out' of Market

An angry and disillusioned shopper in Tomah, Wisconsin, wrote a letter to the editor of the Tomah Journal expressing her disgust with the news that some vendors at the local "farmers market" were selling wholesale produce while making it look like they grew everything themselves. She had suspected something wasn't quite right after sampling some of the imposters' produce. Since the City Council, rebuffing pleas from 20 real farmers, declined to address the issue, the letter writer urged citizens to take matters into their own hands:

"I love my local farmers market, but I don’t like the pretenders coming and running the good farmers out because they buy their produce from an auction. If we band together as a community, maybe we can run the non-farmers out and let the real farmers be the winners. Their produce speaks for them in taste and quality."

Reseller Shamelessly Defends Practice as American Way

John Helming, who resells wholesale produce at a so-called "farmers market" in Tomah, Wisconsin, defends the practice on grounds that it's the American way, and his family has been doing it for nearly a century. Henning tells the Tomah Journal, according to a July 9 report:

“The U.S. is built on competition and if I can sell more tomatoes for less, I will. I think the more people that come to sell, the more buyers. I have no complaints about the market and I’ve seen more people come these past years. ”

Helming, who says his family grows a large garden and mixes some of their own produce with the stuff picked up at a wholesale auction house, insists he "enjoys the business of it and likes to socialize with people." According to the paper, he "claims that though he doesn’t grow it personally, it is of good quality."

Some real farmers in the area think Henning and his ilk flagrantly violate the "spirit of farmers markets." He also unfairly undersells real farmers, stealing customers who were drawn to the market thinking it is a place where they can buy produce picked yesterday by the very person who is selling it. This spring, about 20 farmers who sell at farmers markets in town tried to get authority from the City Council to start a new “homegrown and homemade” market. They were turned down, for reasons that the Journal didn't explain.

The nearby town of Sparta has a successful “homegrown and homemade” market, the newspaper reports. Town officials there held community meetings about the market before it was launched, and learned that townspeople wanted a growers-only market. It was organized with help from the University of Wisconsin Extension and with the participation of the Chamber of Commerce.