Farmers Markets See Risks From Growth
This is an excerpt from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Ben Worthen; you can read the full article here.
Bay Area communities are more eager than ever to set up their own farmers’ markets—but there are too many farmers’ markets and not enough farmers—or customers—to go to market.
The imbalance is bad news for both market and farmer. With new farmers markets springing up—sometimes within blocks of each other—residents now have so many to choose from that some markets don’t draw the critical mass of buyers that farmers need to turn a profit.
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This past year, Ms. Balakian, 24 years old, drove more than 200 miles each week to a one-year-old market held in a Whole Foods parking lot in Mill Valley. The market started at 9 a.m. each Friday, so Ms. Balakian often arrived the night before and spent the night in a hotel before selling the tomatoes, peaches and carrots her family grows on its 75-acre farm. On a good day, she sold about $3,000.
But Ms. Balakian recently tried selling at farmers markets in Pleasanton and Los Altos, where “we didn’t make enough to cover our expenses,” she says. She adds that she sold “maybe $500″ in produce at the Los Altos market.
San Francisco now has 20 farmers’ markets, while Oakland has 14 and Marin County has 12, according to the California Federation of Certified Farmers’ Markets, a trade organization. At least four of the San Francisco markets were new in 2009, and the numbers are set to grow further. Farmers’ market organizers say they get 50 to 100 requests a year from local communities for their own markets. Such market managers typically charge farmers a small fee to cover the cost of staff, permits, and other expenses.
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The growth has been a boon to some consumers. “I like being able to support the local farmers,” says Craig Fatland, a 35-year-old San Francisco resident buying salad greens and lemons at the Ferry Building farmers’ market recently. “There’s more variety and it’s better quality than you would find at the supermarket.”
But some farmers markets are finding the increased competition hard to swallow. After two new markets opened on Saturdays in San Francisco’s Sunset district last summer, visitors dwindled at a Sunday market near that neighborhood’s Park Merced apartment complex.
“I’m not sure [the market] will open” again in the spring, says Gail Hayden who organizes the three-year-old Park Merced market. She notes that one of the new competitors is held in the parking lot of the Stonestown Mall less than a mile away.
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“People want a farmers market, but they don’t take into account that the farmer actually has to make money,” says Dan Best, general counsel of the California Federation of Certified Farmers’ Markets. “Feasible sites for farmers’ markets are like hen’s teeth,” he says. (That’s a farmer joke: Hens don’t have teeth.)