by Tom Roberts
This year the MOFGA Spring Growth conference was dedicated to an all day Farmers Market Workshop running from 8:30am to 3:30pm on March 28. As I traveled to the conference, I was hoping there would be a decent turnout and I was not disappointed.
The Exhibition Hall was half filled with around 90 participants, many of whom had between 5 and 25 years experience at farmers markets. There were a scattering of nonmarketmembers such as Cooperative Extension agents, representatives from MOFGA, the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, the WIC Farmers Market Food & Nutrition service, the Eat Local Foods Coalition and other NGOs. However, bona fide market members both new and old as well as those wishing to join or start a market made up the body of the participants.
The session began with Russell Libby giving a brief history of markets in Maine starting in 1790. Putting our farmers markets into an appropriate cultural and historical perspective was a excellent way to begin the proceedings.
Suzie OKeeffe, who has been working for the past year on researching Maine farmers markets for the Eat Local Foods Coalition (www.meepi.org/elfc) and MOFGA (www.mofga.org), gave a summary of the work she has been doing. Her photo displays along the walls focused on vendor displays, truck and market signage, stall coverings, market layouts and other details that various markets around the state were doing particularly well. Her tour of the markets during the summer of 02 visited 29 of Maines 51 farmers markets.
On the center tables were written reports on even more subjects related to farmers market, using material from all over the U.S. on displays, supporting local markets, websites, brochures from various markets, and a dozen other topics. These all now reside in the MOFGA library, upstairs over the front office.
Also on display were items from the Maine Federation of Farmers Markets, including the booklet Best of Selling Outdoors, a sampling of the 2002 Waterville Sentinel half page ads for the Fairfield Farmers Market, the article Where will Maine Farmers Markets be in 2012?, the brochure A Market in Your Town? directed toward municipal officials, and more photos of markets throughout the state. Much of this material is available at the MFFM website, www.MFFM.org, a resource for markets and market members throughout Maine.
After the introductory presentations, the open space part of the conference began. All present were encouraged to write their questions or topics on slips of paper they then attached to one of five large flip charts. After about 15 minutes of this, the slips were sorted into general categories and applied to one or another of the flip charts titled with the general category. Next the entire assemblage broke into smaller groups of interest around each category where the questions got asked and the details sorted out.
After about an hour, these groups broke up and reformed to allow everyone to attend a different group discussion.
The wonderful lunch was entirely of Maine grown products (except the olive oil, coffee and salt, as caterer Dianne Prizio pointed out). Lunch time also offered completely unstructured free flowing discusssions among the various participants.
After lunch people broke into a third session of topic groups for further discussion.
During the wrapup, brief summaries of the discussion groups were given, and ideas for various means of continuing farmers market discussions were made. Some of these include greater participation in providing content to www.mffm.org, a meat marketing conference in the fall, farmers markets at agricultural fairs, a web page based bulletin board (any volunteers to set one up and be moderator?), cooperative farmers market advertising in newspapers, establishment of regional market masters, a statewide Buy Local day, and many more.
Deanne Herman, Marketing Director at the Maine Dept. of Agriculture, gave a report on what the Department is doing to promote Maines farms and farmers markets. She detailed the ever growing content on the marketing website www.GetRealMaine.com, including an uptodate listing of all Maines Farmers Markets and their pertinent info. She stressed that the Department responds more readily to a state association than it can to individuals or individual markets, and suggested we move in that direction.
What was to be learned at this conference? Certainly too much to catalog here. Some questions and problems were quickly resolved and others certainly will be argued until the end of time.
There were questions from people wanting to join a market, set up at a market, create a market, add another day or location to an existing market; questions about obtaining scales and bags, how to handle cash, market and member insurance, attracting new members, what state licenses vendors need, what types of vendors should a market look for, how to set prices, and dozens of other questions most of which were readily answered by other attendants.
New and perennial problems facing all markets at one time or another were hashed out and opinions offered from all sides. Often we were far from final resolution of such issues, but more illumination and perspective was offered to help markets think through their difficulties. Whether to limit market membership, how to deal with low income communities, municipal officials, whether to have a paid market manager, developing trust among members, competition with existing farmers markets and local roadside stands, how to handle market growth,
There was general agreement that more needs to be done to increase public awareness all over the state about the value of eating local food to our physical and economic health. With only a small percentage of Maine's residents shopping at farmers markets, there is enormous potential for increasing the demand for local agricultural products and venues to purchase them.
Oddly enough, even with some markets having used multithousand dollar media promotions, various surveys show that wordofmouth and local signage seems to always top the list of how people find out about a farmers market.
The cooperation and willingness to share knowledge among old and new market members about the whole range of farmers market experience was quite inspiring during the entire conference. I eagerly await another conference like this one. Meanwhile, more in depth discussions of some of the topics brought up at the conference can be found at www.MFFM.org, and if you have ideas, whether you attended the conference or not, please share them with other marketers.
Tom Roberts (tom@snakeroot.net) and partner Lois Labbe operate Snakeroot Organic Farm in Pittsfield and attend the Unity, Pittsfield, Orono and Fairfield farmers markets. Tom has attended farmers markets continuously since 1983 and is the webweaver at www.MFFM.org.