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.”

Comments

[Debbi]

I have to say that I think that the original farmers should be the ones at the farmers' markets. Its so hard here in Michigan to make rules that exclude others from making money because our economy is so bad but I think that consumers would agree that the farmers should be at the market.

[Luis Vazquez]

Actually, I am not a farmer, as cited in your post. I was the Chair of the City of Ann Arbor Market Commission, and fought for years to have rules strengthened so that re-sellers would not be able to undercut the true farmers and vendors at our market. After my term on the commission, a certain local blog uncovered exactly where the "faked goods" vendor was getting some of his frozen pies, and posted the evidence: http://arbormarketwatch.blogspot.com/2009/02/breaking-news-evidence-emerges-of.html and then the local media caught on. The website annarbor.com posted a video: http://www.annarbor.com/news/no-faked-goods-says-farmers-market-protestor/index.php

So far, nobody has been able to dispute my claims about Kapnick Orchards baked goods, and I think you are raising awareness of the issue in a very good way. Please keep up the pressure so that we can all keep people accountable and know for certain where our food comes from.