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One of the issues that we have been wrestling with at our market has been the entire issue of reselling produce. I thought it was an issue that was excelusive to our market but after talking with managers at other markets in our area as well as with folks at the Nationals Small Farm Conference, it became clear that this is an issue for a lot of markets.
I attended a seminar on farmers markets at the conference and a guy from the University of Oregon gave a session. As he was speaking, I was struck about how the market he was talking about had an embarrassment of riches; close proximity to a lot of growers (even a lot of organic ones) and a nice population center that could support a thriving market.
We aren't so lucky where I am at. We are a highly developed area 30 minutes north of Atlanta. The county I’m in has typically been in the list of the 50 fastest growing counties in the country. Before the real estate bust, land was being gobbled up at 70 to 100 thousand dollars an acre. This caused a lot of farmland and growing activities in the county to disappear. As many cities in the county tried to begin to start farmers markets, the issue became one of farmer scarcity. When our market started, we had no choice to allow people to purchase produce from the terminal market to resell because we just couldn’t find local growers. And we did start to find them, they could not keep up with demand.
I spent the last 4 years trying to find growers and was able to get lucky this winter. I was able to get a couple of decent sized ones and some smaller "backyard" growers. But even with finding these growers, we still hit the reselling hump again. A lot of crops in demand by customers such as corn and field peas are simply not grown by my local farmers or they are not grown in sufficient enough quantities to meet demand. We had very few complaints from customers this year but the ones we did have were mainly about the quantity and diversity of the crops we had. A large portion of this may have stemmed from consumers not truly understanding what it means to buy local and how it affects crop availability. But a lot of it was we simply didn't have product available. While we have allowed some limited reselling, price cutting has not been an issue and for the most part, we have been able to hold a pricing structure that we have all been able to live with.
I need to think about how to manage this issue so that I am meeting consumer demand while also moving to having as much locally grown food as I can. Is this an issue you deal with in your market? How have you handled it?
Thanks
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