Bringing the Country back to the City

Where to shop for food has always been a question of taste. Supermarkets offer convenience and consistency; they also stock mealy tomatoes and processed cheese. Meanwhile, a gourmet revolution has transformed America’s epicurean culture, making sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar household items, and Indian, Japanese, and other cuisines part of the national diet. Local produce is the final frontier for urban foodies, who scour farmers’ markets for zucchini blossoms, and for whom connoisseurship of heirloom tomatoes may supplant the prestige of an encyclopedic knowledge of wines.

Such discernment smacks of food snobbery. Author Deborah Madison’s 2002 cookbook, Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets, was greeted with accusations of elitism when it offered recipes for such “common” items as black kale, burdock, and pummelos. But she wasn’t telling a New York or L.A. story; Madison visited farmers’ markets in cities from Cleveland to Sacramento, Birmingham, Alabama, Trenton, and Anchorage. Once an integral part of urban life, farmers’ markets have resurfaced, benefiting city residents of all classes. 

Before the endless parade of suburban commuters, farmers were the ones who clogged the roads into a city and around the markets where they sold their wares. The basic principle of exchange made city and country interdependent. Refrigeration and transport developments in the late-19th and early-20th century, however, reduced the need both to buy daily produce and to keep town and country in close proximity. By the mid-20th century, most municipal markets had moved to the city fringes before our modern supermarket distribution system rendered them obsolete. Orchards were cleared for residential cul-de-sacs as suburban sprawl enveloped the space between cities and farmland. The “country” has continued to move further away over the past half-century–often it’s now in another country.

But, in some places, city and country are growing closer again. In more and more cities, on a given day and place, we find the curiously anachronistic sight of city dwellers buying their produce fresh from the trucks of farmers, who came from not so far away. These supposedly antiquated markets seem very cutting-edge. A farmers’ market “renaissance” in the late-‘70s has spread throughout the country. Recently, their growth has been particularly swift: from 1,755 markets in 1994 to 3,137 in 2002.

In 2000, 66,700 farmers served 2.76 million customers a week at farmers’ markets, suggesting that more is at stake than the next gourmet mini-fad. Markets benefit small farmers and those who love them, but they also help the environment (reducing transportation-related pollution and encouraging organic standards), public health, poor neighborhoods, immigrants, and even farmers’ suburban neighbors. This may seem like a lot for farmers and city dwellers buying and selling tomatoes for gazpacho in front of City Hall to accomplish. But these small transactions can have wide repercussions.

A Sense of Responsibility

In Boston, neighborhood markets operate every day of the week. “Boston is a city where there is probably a farmers’ market not too far from you,” says Hannah Freedberg. Freedberg is the community outreach director at the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers’ Markets, a non-profit organization founded in 1978 as “a home for the oversight and support of farmers’ markets” in the state. A recent Boston Public Market Association study found that 67 percent of the city’s primary food shoppers have shopped at a farmers’ market, with 5 to 10 percent using the markets regularly. The state had about a hundred markets in operation in the 2004 season, second in number only to California.

The Brookline farmers’ market is one of the Boston area’s most successful. In 2003 it was featured in USA Today as one of ten “great places to get some farm-fresh food” nationwide, alongzeet, set up their tents and tables in a municipal parking lot. From June through October the market fills with people from the neighborhood–first the retirees and area workers on their lunch breaks, then the after-school crowd of young parents and kids. Just before closing, the young professionals trickle in. At the height of the season, according to market manager Arlene Flowers, it’s not unusual to see 2,500 to 3,000 people lined up for goat cheese, Asian vegetables, organic produce, turkey pies, and flowers.

Steve Violette of Dick’s Market Garden and Glenn Stillman of Stillman’s Farms are Brookline’s biggest vendors, with three ten-foot stalls each. Every week they drive in from Lunenberg, an hour away, their trucks filled with apples, zucchini, broccoli, fennel, sweet corn, and melons. The farmers at Brookline’s market show an astonishing engagement with their work. They run a business, but they see it as a public service to the communities they farm in, and to the communities that buy their produce. They consider themselves “stewards of the soil” or “caretakers of agriculture,” working everyday towards long-term goals like preserving farmland and unique crops, and helping city-dwellers connect with the land next door to them.

“It’s hard work,” says Glenn Stillman. “If you can imagine moving, we do it every day.” With his daughter and son-in-law, the Stillmans sell at eleven markets in the Boston area, six days a week. “The margins are good” at urban markets–despite the cost of fuel, additional labor, and time not spent farming. Stillman’s tried to do wholesale for a couple of years, but like most farmers at the market, they found it did not pay. Supermarkets keep prices artificially low and won’t buy the varied and variable produce of a market garden. Stillman concludes: “I don’t know in this area if you can not do retail markets and survive.”

Jon Konove, who raises cattle at River Rock Farm in Brimfield, sells fancy cuts of beef to “white tablecloth” restaurants in the area. He also does a brisk sale of ground beef and hot dogs (among other things) in Brookline and at other markets, since only one out of ten pounds of beefis top quality restaurant material. Without selling directly to urban consumers, the farm couldn’t afford to raise its nearly hundred heads of cattle. The cattle do more than provide farm-raised natural beef and hot dogs: they help forestall agricultural land loss.

Saving the Farm

Land pressures just outside the city are the backdrop to every market’s few square feet of greenery over urban pavement. The problem is particularly acute in Massachusetts, which is second in the nation in farmland acreage lost to development. “Most farmers in the eastern part of the state are farming in suburbia,” according to Cris Coffin, New England Policy Manager of the American Farmland Trust (AFT). In those suburban communities, farmland has far less dollar value than it would as lots for residential subdivisions. The pressure to cash out, especially for retirement-age farmers (and the average farmer is about that age), is enormous. Every time one does, the market value of the land makes it well-nigh impossible for a neighbor or a new farmer to succeed him. More often than not, the land is paved over and built up.

The AFT, which promotes conservation easements to help preserve farmland in the area, makes a strong economic argument in favor of open space. Their “cost of community services” studies show that farms, which require far less in services than they pay in taxes, offset the enormous costs of residential development, with their demand for schools, roads, police, even jails. “If you don’t have open land,” says Coffin, “you are likely to have a difficult time in balancing the town budget.” Of course, strip malls and industrial parks also pay more in taxes than they require in services. But farms also provide open spaces, which create environmental, cultural, and quality of life benefits that are harder to quantify economically.

Growing Community Demand

Urban consumers have embraced farmers’ markets for the benefit of their own communities as well. Many urban patrons like to know that they are supporting nearby farms, and they like to know the farmers who grow their food. At the market, someone is accountable for the product they sell and can vouch for its quality, freshness, and localness. For families, going to the market can be an educational experience–the only way to learn about agriculture and where what we eat comes from. “Being able to connect with your food source bodes very well for agriculture across the country,” says Jeff Coles, director of the Federation of Massachusetts Farmers’ Markets and a farmer himself. Strengthening rural-urban connections, he adds, is fundamental to the continued survival of small farms.

Beyond providing a sense of security from buying produce directly, farmers’ markets reinforce the urban community. Nearly 90 percent of customers at urban markets come from within a two-mile radius, making them important community spaces, meeting places for neighbors, and civic events unto themselves. For a day, and a season, they transform such urban amenities as a parking lot and the space under a highway overpass into busy plazas. Farmers’ markets have made New York’s Union Square a safer park, Copley Square in Boston a less transitory space, and the brutalist concrete City Hall Plaza there, well, slightly more humane.

Markets do face opposition, however, from parking-starved downtowns, resentful local business owners, and public agencies upset at some of the byproducts of an increased human presence. They fear that markets incur costs but no benefits for the host parking lots and main squares. But farmers’ markets bring more people–and business–to their surroundings. The Project for Public Spaces, an organization that advocates for vital and inclusive public spaces, considers markets as important a component as transportation, parks, and better buildings for thriving urban communities. National studies show that for every $10 consumers spend at a farmers’ market, they’ll spend an additional $8.61 at local businesses (without counting parking fees).

“Farmers are in demand now in communities,” says Steve Violette. As more and more neighborhoods try to establish farmers’ markets, competition for vendors has become a major concern. Farms like Stillman’s are asked to join ten to twelve markets every year. But many new markets cannot provide the customers or stability that make the trip worthwhile for farmers. “In the Boston area,” says Freedberg, “there are a number of neighborhoods that are maxed out on farmers’ markets. There are enough markets to serve the need,” and more efforts are now focused on increasing demand, rather than access. Meanwhile, those successful, established, and high-traffic markets like Brookline’s have waiting lists of farmers who would love the chance to sell to their affluent customers.

Building Markets in Low-Income Neighborhoods

Not surprisingly, it is low-income neighborhoods that have the hardest time attracting farmers and sustaining markets. “Sadly,” for Freedberg, “it becomes a question of economic reality because there isn’t enough money in the community’s collective pocketbook” to support a market. These are often the communities that would benefit most from the regular presence of a farmers’ market. In these neighborhoods, underserved by grocery stores and with little to no availability of fresh produce, markets provide a means to stabilize the food supply and address chronic nutrition issues. And according to the Project for Public Spaces, “for a community with few public spaces, a market can become its de facto civic square.”

Efforts to harness the multiple potentials of low-income neighborhood markets are being explored by such organizations as the Ford Foundation, which, in collaboration with the Office of Community Services of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has recently issued a request for proposals for $2 million in funds in support of public markets and community development. From community groups and foundations to the federal, state, and local governments, people are looking to markets as a solution to more than one problem.

The Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) originated in Massachusetts in 1986 and was adopted nationally by Congress in 1992. In 44 states, participants in the USDA’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program receive supplemental FMNP coupons to buy fresh local produce at farmers’ markets for their families. The goal, says David Webber, Farmers’ Market Program Coordinator at the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, “is to develop regular shoppers for the future.” In 2003, over 2.3 million WIC recipients participated (providing $24.2 million in revenues for farmers). A similar program now exists for seniors. A report by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Project for Public Spaces finds that “participation in both the WIC and senior FMNP programs, and a location that can draw on a large number of customers who might use these programs, is a fundamental aspect of success” for markets in low-income neighborhoods.

Markets can help provide food and jobs for people on society’s margins. A quarter of the markets nationwide participate in gleaning programs, which collect the day’s leftovers for distribution to needy families and individuals. And small farms often employ recent immigrants, who often have more agricultural expertise than new U.S. farmers, and can continue to farm the land of retired ones. Massachusetts’ New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, similar to other programs throughout the country, helps Hmong, Khmer, Liberian, and Dominican immigrants and refugees find land to farm and markets to sell what they grow. Hmong farmers in particular are fixtures at Boston area markets, where they sell many types of greens, including traditional Asian favorites not otherwise easily available, to a mixed clientele. Even homeland security thinkers have jumped on the bandwagon, although they propose grimmer justification for local markets than feeding the hungry or making face-time with farmers: the vulnerabilities of a food supply system dependent on cross-country highway travel and international air and sea shipments.

A Permanent Place

In Boston, the next step is to ensure the continued success of the markets by institutionalizing them. A non-profit association has been advocating for the establishment of a year-round public market, a permanent facility in downtown Boston modeled on the success of those in Philadelphia and Seattle, among others.

As a tunnel finally replaces the elevated I-93 highway in downtown Boston and acres of city land are restored to greenery as part of the Big Dig project, the Boston Public Market Association sees an opportunity to bring local farms and farmers directly into the fabric of the city. “Just the experience of being in downtown Boston to buy food from Massachusetts farmers, grown a few miles away,” is a meaningful one, according to Gregory Bialecki, the association’s chairman. For the concerned consumer and gourmand, a permanent location will also mean access to local products when seasonal markets are closed, as well as to dairy, fish, and meat, which are harder to sell outdoors. For farmers it would be a major sales point. And for the city, it would offer a new public “green” space reclaimed from the clutches of the interstate highway system. A year-round market is a modest proposal. It won’t put supermarkets out of business nor stop suburban development from subsuming farmland. A permanent space for farms in the city, however, would go a long way towards restoring the battered relationship between city and country. We could eat better, too.

American Farmland Trust

http://www.farmland.org

Boston Public Market Association

http://www.bostonpublicmarket.org

Jane Brox. Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm. New York: North Point Press, 2004.

“Public Markets & Community-Based Food Systems: Making Them Work in Lower-Income Neighborhoods.” Prepared by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for the Project for Public Spaces, Inc. Nov. 2003.

http://www.pps.org

Deborah Madison. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets. New York: Broadway Books 2002