Food is more than just picking up the item and buying it: Farm and farming issues. I've been keeping track of some of the broader issues concerning farms and farming, as something we should be thinking about all the time, but especially when it comes to National Farmers Market Week.
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Farmers markets as events. Most people think of farmers markets as events--I call them activation devices--to go out and do something.
WRT activation, many years ago I wrote a piece outlining the different reasons to sponsor a market, and how that should shape policy wrt what can be sold, and the distance away by which a farm can be considered local.
-- "The reason(s) why a farmers market is created shapes the type and mix of vendors allowed to sell" (2011)
One reason is to support farm income and the regional economy.
In DC, you get lots of vendors from West Virginia and Pennsylvania because they get better prices in the big city.
For example, there is research about the social value of markets as community hubs--that's great for the attendees, but what about the value to the farmers? ("Do Farmers Markets Build Community? New Research Says Yes," PPS)
Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market, University District Farmers Market, Seattle, Washington. Credit: Redstone PhotographyFarmers markets are supposed to be places to buy food first and foremost, food that is locally produced ("Local, organic, and bipartisan: How Vermont is challenging Big Food,," Christian Science Monitor).
Secondarily we think about how farmers markets are supposed to be ways to cut out the middleman in a quest to get better and local (regionally sourced) food, ideally at a cost lower than from the supermarket.
This is an old photo. This year stone fruits are in short supply in Utah because of a late freeze in early June.Well, maybe just maybe cheaper than Whole Foods--last week at the Downtown Farmers Market in Salt Lake City, which is a great one, in large part because there aren't dozens of markets in the area, but a handful, making it worthwhile for a large number of vendors to show up, vendors were selling corn for $8 per dozen.
Granted it's not the 70s when you could get that many ears from a truck farmer for $1. Still that's a shocker.
While a lot of the items sold at markets are value added products--e.g., hot sauce made from locally grown peppers, and the sauce costs more than selling raw peppers--the fact is food comes from farms. And cost-wise, inputs, labor, taxes, it might not be enough ("Massachusetts loves its small farms. Will that be enough to save them?," Christian Science Monitor).
BLT at Middle Child.
Farm to Table/Featuring local foods in special ways promotes the regional food system. Farm to table is a longstanding movement where restaurants make items based on what they can source from local farms and farmers markets. Some restaurants even have their own farms.
Middle Child in Philadelphia features for one month heirloom tomatoes grown at Philadelphia's Urban Roots Farm in BLTs--also with locally grown arugula and bread from the artisan Merzbacher’s Bakery ("Middle Child’s BLT season has arrived. This is how they prepare for the frenzy," Philadelphia Inquirer). They also offer tomato agua fresca, tomato water ice, frozen tomato pops, and tomato martinis.
An increasing number of bakeries are using regionally-grown harvested and milled grains, rather than standardized industrial seed varieties ("Regionalizing Michigan’s Small Grains: Highlights from the 2026 Food-grade Grains Field Day," Michigan State University).
VINE Foods, a new agricultural innovator to the market, starts its inaugural harvest of vine-ripened tomatoes on June 25, 2026 at 4451 Knight Arnold Road in Memphis. Photo: Stu Boyd II-The Commercial AppealRelatedly, VINE Foods in Memphis is a small urban farm aiming to grow items that are best grown and consumed locally, like tomatoes ("VINE Foods plants roots in Memphis with innovative urban farm," Memphis Commercial Appeal).
This is sort of what Urban Roots Farm is doing, and could be done in more places. They also focus on the recovery and reuse of vacant lots, which is important in cities that have lost population ("Memphis-founded VINE Foods turns abandoned lots into organic produce farms," ActionNews5).
Years ago, I came across the Tomato Independence Project initiative in Treasure Valley/Boise, which now seems inactive ("Building a Better Tomato" Edible Idaho) and if you've tasted a great heirloom tomato off the vine, you know how important it is to spread the understanding of food that is not so industrialized that the flavor is gone, which is a problem with most tomatoes sold at the supermarket.
More farming and promotion initiatives like this need to be developed throughout the country, to promote the consumption of what is otherwise highly perishable but super tasty locally grown foods. The Dwarf Tomato Project is a national version, still at a small scale, of the TIP.
Wasatch Community Gardens in Salt Lake holds an annual "Tomato Sandwich Party." (Photo at right.)Now, VINE Foods needs to find a restaurant partner like Middle Child.
Food needs sun and water (and other inputs) to grow | Climate change. Crops need sun and water and other inputs to grow. And labor to tend to the crops and then to pick them. Bad weather can be catastrophic ("Spring’s bizarre weather caused up to $200 million in lost crops in Pa. N.J. farmers also suffered." Philadelphia Inquirer, "A late spring frost wiped out much of Utah’s tree fruit crop. Here’s what growers are selling instead," Salt Lake Tribune). Weather is becoming much more extreme due to climate change, and the geographic areas where food can be grown are shifting in response to higher temperatures.
Weeks after December’s historic floods, water remains on Yeng Lee Cha’s farm in Snohomish. Cha says her farm experienced up to 9 feet of flooding, and the water didn’t recede for nearly two months in certain areas. The rushing water damaged farm... (Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times)Flooding too ("WA’s Hmong farmers face floods at generational crossroads," Seattle Times). Not just flooding, but land sinking as water is drained from underground aquifers ("Study finds California farmland is sinking shockingly fast," SFGATE).
1. Food borne illness is a symptom of regulatory failure and the perils of large scale mass agriculture. The media is full of reporting on cyclosporiasis associated with lettuce. "Cyclospora isn’t new. Why it’s different now," USA Today:
Every summer, it seems, we get the same headline: a cluster of cyclosporiasis cases traced to fresh produce, a recall, a brief wave of concern and then silence until next year. The news coverage almost always frames this as a food safety story – contaminated basil, bad lettuce, a supplier that slipped through the cracks.
I want to offer a different diagnosis, because I’ve watched this exact pattern before, in a very different disease. This is a slow, environmentally dependent parasite with no capacity to outrun a functioning surveillance system. It has no ability to evolve its way past inspection. It only needs one thing to spread further than it used to: for us to stop looking as carefully as we once did. That’s the part of this story nobody is telling.
Import inspection capacity, produce sampling at the border, the state public health laboratories running whole-genome sequencing to match an isolate from a sick patient to a specific lot number, the epidemiologists converting scattered case reports into a recognized cluster – this is the immune system protecting our food supply. And like any immune system, when you starve it of resources, you don’t get a healthier host. You get a slower, blinder response to a threat that was always there.
Decades ago Jim Hightower wrote a book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, criticizing Agricultural Colleges and their research programs designed to promote big agriculture by creating nee tools and crop seeds modified for easier picking and distribution over great distances rather than for nutrition and flavor.
Who knew that one of the outcomes of Big Agriculture/Big Farming could be Big Diarrhea.
Trading farm futures on your phone.2. Tariffs, foreign policy fights, etc. Many farmers have lost access to markets because of tariffs or responses to US foreign policy ("Already under financial pressure, farmers squeezed further by tariffs and Iran war," PBS).
Plus the Iran War has impacted the production of fertilizer inputs and the transport of fertilizer using the Strait of Hormuz ("The Iran War threatened a food crisis. The next Gulf conflict could do the same," Reuters).
... another reason why many farmers are active in buying and selling futures. Or going bankrupt ("Minnesota bankruptcies rise as a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges roils farm country," MinnPost).
3. Farming is hard work and its hard to convince younger people to take it up ( "Why The Kids Won't Farm," New York Times).
4. Food science and technology. Growing food involves scientific research ("Her Lab Worked to Future-Proof Fruits and Vegetables," New York Times), some of which the US under the Trump Administration doesn't want to fund anymore. Some favor large scale production--industrial food--others don't ("Stop Worrying, and Learn to Love Industrial Food,," and "What Our Industrial Food System Can't Do," NYT).
5. Food as intellectual property/Big corporations and massive supply chains. As seeds beome patented, problems are created for farmers, including if they aren't licensed ("A California farmer is giving away tons of nectarines that he’s not allowed to sell" AP).
Driscoll's has shifted from being a large farming operation to a massive "systems integrator" operating across the globe to make strawberries available every month of the year ("Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s," NYT).
A fire burns piles of grapevines and stakes after they were ripped out at Sarmento Vineyard. Photo: Nic Coury for The New York Times6. Big farmers are less flexible with major changes in conditions. For example, because people are buying fewer canned peaches, Del Monte is closing canneries and peach orchards need new markets (s ("California farmers must destroy 420,000 peach trees after Del Monte closes its canneries and cancels more than $550 million in long-term contracts," Fortune Magazine).
As people drink less alcohol, including wine, more vineyards are shutting down ("Sales Are So Low, California Wineries Are Burning Their Vineyards," NYT).
7.
Right to repair. Like with the concept of food as intellectual property, farm equipment has become much more technologically complex, full of electronics and sensors and connections to data systems and services that make recommendations on how to plow particularly plots, how much seed and fertilizer, etc.
As equipment becomes more complex companies like John Deere had licensing agreements that prevented farmers from fixing the equipment themselves. They had to wait for registered technicians, which can put equipment out of service for days.
For years farmers have been fighting for the "right to repair." They made some gains at the state level ("Colorado gave farmers the right to repair their own equipment, but Great Plains, Oklahoma farmers continue waiting," KOSU/Oklahoma Public Radio) but enacting federal legislation was impossible.
Nevertheless, John Deere, the leading manufacturer, finally capitulated ("John Deere owners will get the right to repair their own equipment under a new FTC settlement," AP).
Farmers Andrew Cadwallader and his father David Cadwallader (front) at Waldac Farms in Salem, N.J., on Jan. 29. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer8. Smaller farms need multiple revenue streams to survive. In the past, there has been opposition to farms adding event spaces and agritourism accommodations, new types of facilities,
There was a dairy selling ice cream issue years ago in Baltimore County, selling out to housing developers, now solar and wind farms, which some farms aim to add to increase and stabilize revenues.
Boston Globe photo.Salem, Pennsylvania wouldn't allow a dairy farm to add solar panel electricity generation to add revenue ("Will this Salem County town love its last dairy farm to death?," Philadelphia Inquirer). So they got rid of their cows. From the article:
The future of a family farm in rural Salem County was at stake, and after multiple meetings and hours of presentations, questions, pleas, and complaints, a local planning board was set to vote.
Before the vote, one longtime resident of Mannington Township came to the podium with a warning. In preparation for this crowded, mid-March meeting, Alice Waddington, 98, said she’d made a list of dairy farms she remembered from her decades in the little town.
At one time, she said, there were close to a dozen. “There’s only one farm left milking cows,” Waddington told the board, “and that’s the Cadwalladers.”
In Vermont, farmers are fighting similar kinds of restrictions ("A rural rebellion in Vermont is on the verge of unlikely success," Boston Globe).
9. Some farmers are making more money off social media than farming ("The Family Farmers Making More From Clicks Than Crops," Wall Street Journal). This is led by younger generations of the family.
Labels: commercial district revitalization planning, community economic development, food-agriculture-markets, regional economies, regulation/regulatory policy, urban design/placemaking, urban vs. suburban vs. rural
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