farmers markets

Can locavores embrace a truly place-based agriculture?

In "Dispatches From the Fields," Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America's agro-industrial landscape.

The architectural remnants of an ancient agrarian civilization known as the Ancestral Puebloans cover the Southwest.

Photo: Stephanie Ogburn.

It's somewhat astonishing that there's a thriving local food scene where I live, in Montezuma County, Colorado. Not because the area is poor, rural, and thus removed from the trendiness of the local food movement that has hit most large population centers -- rather, because it's so difficult to grow food here.

In a normal year, towns in Montezuma County get between 13 and 18 inches of precipitation. The growing season is short; although most of the region falls into zones 6a/5b on the USDA hardiness map, it frosted here on June 12 this year, and that's not unusual. Temperature variation between day and night can easily range 40 degrees, as the thin desert air heats up with the sun but fails to retain any of that heat due to the lack of humidity.

Farmers markets and local agriculture: age-old systems for the future

We often think that farmers markets are products of our times as they spring up in cities and small towns across the country. Truth is, a farmers market is the traditional way of selling agricultural produce around the world.

The really nice aspect of this transaction is that the farmer receives just compensation for his product and the eater can be assured the product is fresh, local, and grown in a manner that is acceptable to all. If these criteria are not met, the consumer can look for another farmer whose products better suit his or her needs.

After the industrialization of agriculture, farmers still sold at farmers markets, but it was just a matter of time before supermarkets were developed and farmers started selling to large companies that moved food all over the world; many Americans stopped planting gardens because it was so much easier to get "everything" at the store.

We certainly have gained something through the globalized food system: more variety, foods we cannot grow in cold climates, and, of course, cheap food that is mass-produced by underpaid farmers and farm workers. Some good news, some bad. I certainly like coffee and chocolate, but I want to know the growers and workers were paid fair wages and that the crops were grown in an environmentally-responsible manner. I would like to be sure all the food I need to buy meets those same standards, whether imported or locally grown.

How to ask hard questions of the people who grow your food

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. What to do when it’s not so spelled out for you? Photo: Jennifer Dickert   Dear Checkout Line, Any suggestions on how to ask local farmers (or the person selling the goods at […]

For some farmers, distant markets offer the best prices

In "Dispatches From the Fields," Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America's agro-industrial landscape.

I don't know how many different farmers markets readers have the opportunity to attend within one area. As a consumer, it seems reasonable to pick one and stick with it. But as a farmer, it's a good idea to sell at multiple markets; it offers the opportunity to sell products at different times during the week as produce becomes available and also increases sales, since the farmer can reach that many more customers at each market.

Here in southwest Colorado, the farmer for whom I work attends no fewer than four markets per week. Two of them are fewer than 10 miles from the farm, and the other two are much further afield, requiring drives of 45 and 75 miles to reach. Interestingly, the market that is farthest away is also the most lucrative, and this got me thinking about farm location versus consumer location, a dynamic that makes the buy-local trend a little challenging.

Now’s the time for scapes and green garlic

Food headlines hardly bring comfort these days: tales of lost harvests, hunger riots, agrichemical runoff, tainted pork and tomatoes.  A society’s foodways surely reveal something about its quality of life. From studying the industrial-food system, as I do, it’s easy to conclude that we live in a brutal culture: content to destroy the ecosystem, exploit […]

Low-income nabes lead the way in urban farming

The Garden of Hope -- the new community green space I covered this week on Grist -- is just one facet of Brooklyn's community gardening scene.

While writing this story I spoke with Susan Fields of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's GreenBridge program, which reaches out to neighborhoods all over Brooklyn to encourage and to support many levels of gardening -- from the "Greenest Block in Brooklyn" contest all the way to the Urban Composting Project. "There's a growing focus on urban food production," she told me.

If you support the standards but not the certifiers, then what?

At my local Saturday farmers market, I stopped to buy some coffee at the local roaster's booth. I was eying the wares when I noticed that the spendy bags of coffee ($9 for 12 oz.) labeled "Fair Trade" didn't have the any independent certification of that fact.

I asked the guy behind the booth, and he said, "Well, it is fair trade coffee, and the owners pay the fair trade price, but they don't want to pay for the label mark because it just pays people here in the U.S. -- it just raises the price of a bag of beans, but none of that money goes to the farmers."

So I asked, "But how can the system work to certify fair trade buyers if consumers don't pay for that assurance? I'm sure you're actually paying a fair price, but what keeps the next guy and the supermarket from saying the same thing? Besides, what does it add to the price of a bag, anyway?"

He repeated his bit about the owners not wanting to spend the money on certifiers, and he said that going the certified route would have added a dime to every bag sold.

I said that I would have been willing to pay a dime more for a certified bag, and that I hoped he would tell the owners that, unless they could come up with a way to have truly independent but in-country certification (so the money spent on certifying compliance with fair trade practices went to the country of origin), I wasn't buying their beans or their argument about where the money goes.

I've been thinking about it more this week, while I drink some Bolivian certified organic, shade grown, certified Fair Trade coffee.

Thinkers and doers exchange grand visions in the scenic Rockies

The first full day of the first-ever Aspen Environment Forum kicked off Thursday morning with a handful of the impressive invitees taking a couple minutes each to share a “big idea.” Throughout the day, others tossed their sizeable thoughts into the ring. A sampling: Majora Carter. Majora Carter, founder and head of Sustainable South Bronx: […]

NYC invests in local-food infrastructure

While the farm bill wallows about in Congress, awaiting reconciliation between House and Senate versions, some state and local governments are making their own smart food policies, investing public resources in the worthwhile goal of rebuilding local food systems. A piece in last week’s New York Times food section reminded me of that happy fact. […]