The Farmers’ Market Movement
Farmers’ markets are both a social and an economic movement.
by Tom Roberts, March 2017
A movement is made up of independent entities acting in synchronicity. Movements are created when the common aspirations of thee people begin coming to fruition through direct action. There is a worldwide movement of people who are becoming more aware of and more in control of their food. In some parts of the U.S. this movement is especially strong. One part of this movement focuses on developing new and better ways of connecting people to their food and to food producers. One part of that segment of the movement is the farmers’ markets.
The movement of farmers’ markets is one small but important segment of a worldwide movement by people who are rejecting the tired approaches to business-as-usual, by people who continue to challenge the old approaches which are limited by their inability to imagine serious alternatives to the current mainstream consumer capitalist social structures. Although the spark of organization often comes from the producers, the shoppers soon get on board becoming vital members of the movement.
Appropriately, farmers’ markets are rarely begun as a conscious part of a movement. Originally they are created as tools by groups of individuals meeting together to solve their common marketing problems. Farmers’ markets are rarely formed by people as conscious part of a movement, but rather to solve their own immediate problems. As such they are paradigms of economic democracy, where producers take the marketing of their products into their own hands and manage each market democratically. When we see hundreds of repetitions of such markets forming, it is appropriate think of this as a movement. The level of movement-awareness on the part of the market members varies greatly from vendor to vendor, and from market to market. Yet it is the independent formation of a plethora of markets that creates the movement, not the other way around. At least not in the beginning.
In other instances organizations form markets as tools to meet some other goal, such as improving economic conditions or nutrition of the local population, or bringing more economic or social activity into a downtown area. These too often represent a “copy-catting” of a few of the aspects of successful markets and are most usually organized with a low or non-existent level of awareness of farmers’ markets as a movement. Hence they usually display a top-down organizational model, where the organization responsible for starting the market makes most or all of the decisions about the market, and the market members have little or no say in any aspect of the market’s operation. In effect these markets train their members to be willing free-riders on a system that is provided for them: they are the recipients of yet another modern form of welfare. The rise of movement self-awareness among members of these markets is especially difficult, since the market’s actual structure works against it.
What are Farmers’ Markets?
Farmers’ markets are like icebergs in the sense that only a small part of them is visible. On one level, farmers’ markets represent a repeating hub of connections, with farmers and other small scale food producers arriving in one direction and market shoppers from surrounding towns arriving in the other. At the center is a unique marketing and shopping experience that is the true engine of the market. And although this description reduces the market to merely one of its many dimensions, even this view is further reduced by many who will focus only on the sales transactions when describing a farmers’ market. Whether done by a town official or a market member, this simplistic and harmful economic reductionism toward farmers’ markets is a seductive trap we must avoid falling into ourselves, and must prevent farmers’ markets being so described by authorities and by the media. It does an injustice to our movement by simplifying our function to such a point of near social irrelevance.
One tool for looking at the “rest of the iceberg” is to ask “What do farmers’ markets mean?”
For small scale farmers the markets mean low thresholds to creating a livelihood and a home lifestyle of their own design, free of most of the normal encumbrances and limitations on doing this. The result is a bewildering array of successful income opportunities that families have built with their own hands, wits, and perseverance. These represent ordinary people becoming micro-entrepreneurs who create their economic environment rather than accepting existing pre-defined options.
For shoppers visiting a market, the market means an opportunity to actually meet the people who have dedicated their lives to creating good things to eat, whether by turning their kitchens into micro-factories or by morally stewarding the productive capacity of plots of land. It means the ability to directly exchange ideas with these folks to better understand what is involved in being a part of their food supply. And it means connecting with the local foodshed to provide family meals that are made from the products of the surrounding good earth. Shoppers develop a hunger for these opportunities once they become aware of them.
What about MFFM?
The Maine Federation of Farmers’ Markets is a library of important technical and human resources for the creating and maintaining of farmers’ markets. As a grant-funded non-profit corporation dedicated to providing a range of support services for farmers’ markets, they are akin to the mechanics garages and oil change shops for maintaining our cars—very important and continuing for long without them would make our lives quite a bit more difficult. But when it comes to envisioning the future of automobile transportation such as electric or hydrogen-fueled cars, autonomous cars, or even integrating autos into a saner transportation infrastructure that includes light rail and bullet trains, oil change shops and mechanics garages aren’t the best place to look for such visions. We need to consider what is possible without the limitations of filling out forms and organizing conferences.
The limitations we wish to deal with are those of the human spirit, where mutual love and good will are what inspires the designs of our economies and of our lives. I remember the Red Green skit where he uses a skil saw to hammer in a nail, declaring proudly that “Any tool can be a hammer!”. The message behind the humor stresses that it really is better to find the right tool for the job. I have seen attempts to shoehorn our ideas and visions into pre-existing forms that have put blinders on us and kept our imaginations from generating visions of what farmers’ markets could be. To overcome such limitations, I submit we should begin to think about what we’d like farmers’ markets to become and how relationships between vendors and shoppers can develop without regard to existing legal forms and structures. Later, once we have a collaboratively developed vision, however partial and incomplete, we can investigate which, if any, institutional forms will best serve our needs.
In my attempt to describe what I think farmers’ markets can be, I have to stop to think about what farmers’ markets are from a larger perspective. To develop our markets into a movement that truly addresses the future of the markets, we have to better understand what those possibilities are, even if everyone in the markets do not as yet.
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