Can This Farmer's Market Be Saved?
May/June 2008

How one small town’s struggle for a local market paints a much larger picture.

By Cristina Opdahl

At 8:45 a.m. on one of the last days of September, which is also one of the final days of the first year of the Fayette County Farmers’ Market, there’s a biting chill in the air, particularly in the shade cast by the large courthouse building next to the parking lot where the farmers’ market sets up for a few hours every Saturday morning. Ben Morgan jumps up and down in a black knit hat and a blue fleece pullover to stay warm. He kicks shards of a broken rearview mirror away from the asphalt in front of the table he and his wife run. His one-year-old daughter, Libby, babbles from a portable crib nearby, and his wife, Rebecca, places small plastic containers of green-tinted hummus from a cooler onto a table they have set up near the trunk of their Nissan. An old brown Ford F250 behind the booth next to Ben and Rebecca’s is loaded with pumpkins and gourds, which belong to the Haynes Family Farm. There behind a table filled with peppers and baked goods, Florence Haynes is giving out the recipe for the pumpkin fudge she made the day before, which sits next to several pumpkin rolls that look like enormous orange Ho Hos.

“That fudge recipe comes from a market bulletin a few years ago,” she says. “White chocolate and marshmallows and I think it’s just two-thirds of a cup of pumpkin . . .”

There are no customers in sight, and just a few have come and gone in the past hour, every one of them, it seems, with a pumpkin pie from Florence, who has only two of the five pies left; she made them yesterday from pumpkins she grew in her large garden. The crowds have not yet come and may not, it seems, which I gather from a sign leaning against the official Fayette County Farmers’ Market information table on the other side of Ben and Rebecca Morgan’s: “The Market Needs Your Help! Take a poster and tell 10 friends that this market is here every Saturday 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. IF THE MARKET DOES NOT ATTRACT MORE CUSTOMERS, WE MAY NOT EXIST NEXT YEAR.”

It’s late in the season, and the Fayette County Farmers’ Market organizers don’t really expect or hope for a large crowd of customers, but a dozen shoppers, 15, would be fine, enough to carry away the produce that has arrived here today. Any more than that would be too many for the few farmers who still have produce to sell, any less, a disappointing turnout. Aside from the Morgans’ and the Hayneses’, there are just three other tables: at the far end of the parking lot, a young mother with a baby in a sling is selling apple, mint, and strawberry jelly in small glass jars alongside fresh basil and rosemary. Next to her another woman with a baby in her arms is selling freshly baked rosemary and roasted garlic bread. Polly R Farms has tomatoes, carrots, and green peppers and small sweet breads wrapped in plastic under a blue canopy decorated with dried ornamental corn.

The dire warning on the posterboard is similar to an appeal made in an e-mail sent by the market’s co-founder, Savanna Lyons, one month ago after a particularly slow Saturday in the middle of harvest season: “Today the market brought in only a scattering of customers, and many of our farmers went home with bushels of beautiful produce unsold. Because August is the most abundant month of the harvest season in Fayette County, this is the time of year when farmers at the market are looking for proof that participating in the market is worthwhile—and they’re not convinced.”

I cringe when I see the poster. I exemplified part of the problem of the market’s slow attendance myself that very morning. Short on food in the house for my two children and their babysitter, I’d made the short drive to our local Wal-Mart Supercenter (here after a heated battle between supporters and those who didn’t want a Wal-Mart in their town and where the parking lot always seems to have plenty of cars) and bought some banana nut muffins, which, in addition to including several mysterious ingredients such as sodium stearoyl lactylate, had been shipped from the Wal-Mart distributor in Bentonville, Arkansas, more than 700 miles away. At almost $4, they weren’t cheap, but they had been a sure thing: I knew I could buy them there, and I knew my kids would eat them.

Fayetteville, West Virginia, population 2,754, is a small town on a lush, rolling Appalachian plateau in south central West Virginia, where past decades have brought an influx of whitewater kayakers and rafters and rock climbers, who live alongside former coal miners, who worked the local coal mines that have long since closed. Despite a do-it-yourself culture and a gardening tradition that used to see a garden in every backyard, and despite a hefty population of newcomers who want to eat organic produce, as of that early spring Fayetteville had no farmers’ market. In fact, despite being one of those sports towns that are featured in magazines’ “Best Sports Towns,” Fayetteville’s produce options were mediocre at best. Savanna Lyons, 24, who had moved to Fayetteville in 2006 from New Orleans to work with a watershed nonprofit group, shopped often at a small stand just outside of town and worked in some friends’ gardens in exchange for vegetables.

“I’d gone to the Beckley farmers’ market (30 minutes away), which isn’t really a farmers’ market,” she says. “I was looking for local sources of food.”

Laura Ketchum, 45, a vegetarian who had recently moved to Fayetteville from Bishop, California, where there had been a farmers’ market and where she had been part of a food co-op, did her best to avoid Wal-Mart and shopped at Kroger, which had a tiny organic produce section offering celery, carrots, apples, baby green lettuce packed in plastic bins, and a few other items like grapes or mangoes or avocados when in season. Neither option was satisfactory to Savanna or Laura. Along with some others, they took a poll among friends and acquaintances: who wanted another option? Many said they did.

At the first Fayette County Farmers’ Market meeting in February, 20 people showed up, all of them locals who wanted to buy veggies from local farms. They debated the pros and the cons of a farmers’ market and a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, in which money is paid up front to a grower in return for a weekly box of vegetables all season long. They took a vote and overwhelmingly chose a farmers’ market.

“From what I’ve heard about other markets,” says Laura, “usually when something like this happens it’s the farmers getting together wanting to sell their food. Here it was the buyers getting together, saying, ‘We want something else. What’s out there?’”

Most didn’t know any farmers, but with contacts provided by the county extension office and friends of friends, they put out calls. At the second meeting, 45 people attended, both farmers and buyers. “It was kind of interesting because everybody came in, and the buyers kind of sat on one side of the room and the producers kind of sat on the other side of the room,” remembers Savanah. “We didn’t really know each other, and the buyers were all like young hippy types and the producers were all like old West Virginian farmers, and they were like, ‘Well, we don’t know. How much is it going to cost? Are we going to have to invest a lot of money that we’ll have to get back?’ They were asking a lot of questions, and we had no idea.”

Despite their misgivings, a half-dozen farmers did show up for the first farmers’ market, some bearing tomato seedlings, some with fresh lettuce they weighed out into plastic bags. Savanna and Laura had decided to keep the costs as low as possible: $20 a year for a membership to the market and a free spot from which to sell your produce. As the summer progressed and the crops changed, different farmers made an appearance. One brought watermelons and cantaloupe, another just brought eggs arranged in a stack of cartons, and he left after he quickly sold out. One young man, a climber, started baking bread to sell. He moved away, and the young mother started bringing bread in his place.

Rebecca Morgan and her husband, Ben, who sold insurance and ran a bail bond business during the week, had their garden decimated by deer that spring, but they surveyed what was there and tried to come up with something different. Rebecca started making hummus. She purchased sprout screens and sprouting seeds online and began making sprouts during the week, setting them outside to green on the Friday before market day. By that chilly final market day in September, 30 producers had signed up, although only five to 10 would show on any given Saturday.

Across the rest of the country, farmers’ markets have been sprouting up like weeds. From the mid-1990s to 2007, more than 2,000 new farmers’ markets have appeared in communities nationwide, thanks to the increasingly popular local-foods movement that trumpets seasonal, locally grown food over produce that has been shipped hundreds or thousands of miles.

According to Food Routes, a local-foods advocacy group, food travels an average of 1,300 miles from soil farm to table. In the case of kiwis grown in New Zealand during the winter months—my son’s favorite breakfast food—the distance is more than 6,000 miles. A study generated by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Iowa found that lettuce traveled 2,055 miles from the farm to a Chicago market; grapes, 2,134 miles. We’ve grown so accustomed to eating foods grown in far-flung places 12 months out of the year that we don’t even think about it. Yet it doesn’t take an expert to understand that shipping so much food over such long distances wastes energy and contributes to global warming.

As Michael Pollan points out in his widely acclaimed book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the food industry uses almost one-fifth of the total petroleum burned in the United States—roughly the same amount as automobiles.
Local-foods advocates want more local farms to thrive instead of large-scale commercial farms, which rely on government subsidies and most often use polluting fertilizers and pesticides—many of these known carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors. Although local farms are not necessarily organic, it is thought that they tend to use fertilizers and pest controls more judiciously than their big agribusiness counterparts, which often overfertilize to protect their hefty investment. The extra fertilizer runs off and pollutes water sources downstream (Des Moines, Iowa, downstream of many large commercial farms, issues periodic warnings that it’s unsafe for children to drink water from the tap) and ultimately our oceans (the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi runs into the ocean contains a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey of thick, fish-suffocating algae largely created by fertilizer runoff).

Both Laura and Savanna very much wanted to buy locally grown produce for selfish reasons as well. Local foods have
been shown to be healthier: many allergy sufferers turn to locally produced honey to alleviate their symptoms. And produce that must travel hundreds and thousands of miles tends to be picked before it is naturally ripe. Some produce is gassed to “ripen” it; other fruits are sprayed with preservatives.

Savanna, who had written her senior thesis at Harvard on the peasant agrarian movement in Brazil, wanted to help inspire the local economy here. “When we start to face more of an energy crisis, I think it’s going to become really important to have some sort of structure for local food,” she says. “We’ve become really dependent on these companies to bring us things.”

By 9:26 a.m. the sun is starting to warm the part of the parking lot where the farmers’ trucks and cars are parked, and a few stand back at the edge of the sunny strip while they wait for customers to arrive. A woman wearing a fitted patchwork skirt moves from table to table, buying something from each of the five vendors. She leaves cradling a twisted green and yellow gourd. Rebecca walks back to her table from the Hayneses’ table with long leafy stalks. “Celery!” she exclaims, and puts them in her trunk. The bread maker’s baby, who has been visiting Libby in her portable crib, starts to fuss. His mother comes over from her table to pick him up.

At 9:51 a.m. a woman in a black Mercury Grand Marquis pulls up in front of the booths and cranes her neck from her driver’s seat to see what is on the tables. She eventually parks at one side and gets out, leaving four children inside. “You got any potatoes?” she yells to Florence as she approaches. “Nope,” says Florence. Someone from a nearby booth wonders aloud if it was too dry this year for them. “I just love potatoes,” says the woman. She opens the door and lets her children out of the car to choose some carrots and beans that sit in a basket next to the Hayneses’ table. On previous weeks she bought these same beans and corn and spent a couple of afternoons canning them. “I wish you had potatoes,” she says again to Florence before she leaves.

Florence smiles. She and her husband, Sam, didn’t have much produce to sell at the beginning of the season, but they’ve been here every Saturday since mid-August. “I’ve been peddling vegetables for 30 years,” Florence said to me when we first met. She grew up north of Fayetteville, where the mountains get a little steeper, one sunny mountain ridge over from where she now lives with Sam. Her father died from cancer when Florence was five, leaving behind eight children, including five younger than seven years old. Her mother persevered.

“Mom raised everything we ate,” says Florence. She and her
siblings grew up working in the garden. “It was just a way of life then.” When Florence’s husband left his job at a nearby coal mine, which has since closed down, they were able to supplement their income by selling vegetables.
On a fall morning in between market days, Florence invited me to see the farm she shared with Sam on top of a small mountain, an idyllic place with nearly 360-degree views. Three brown-and-white cows munch on grass in one of several large fields. There are chickens wandering around, pecking the ground behind the two-story log house that Sam built himself. A raised bed for rhubarb, which did great this year, sits with pink stalks and huge leaves. A bed of asparagus has gone to seed, with wispy tops and bright red seedpods. The main garden lies about a hundred yards from the large front porch; there are beets with dark red veins in their leaves, red and yellow tomatoes ripening on the vine, and bushy carrot tops. I look down. Pinto beans with thin paper wrappers are growing on a low bush. “Pinto beans?” I ask. I’d grown up with a garden myself, but we’d never grown pintos.

“You just buy a bag of beans out of the store and plant them,” Florence says. “And then I shell ’em out when the pods start turning yellow and then I just wash them and put them into jars and can them. And that way, whenever you go to make your pan cornbread and eat the beans, you’re done. You don’t need to cook them two hours.”
Florence and the other growers did not have time to plan for a farmers’ market this year. They just brought what they had. For next year she plans on planting more greens and more butternut squash. She’s experimenting with other crops too. Down the gently sloping hill from the house, Florence is attempting to grow kiwis from seeds she’s pulled out of fruit she purchased at the grocery store. Florence points to a peanut plant beside the beets. “They bloom and then they send a little tube out that blooms and—see there—they go down in the ground and that’s what makes your peanuts.”

I ask Florence if she has been happy with her sales at the farmers’ market, and she nods enthusiastically. “We’ve sold just about everything we’ve brought each weekend,” she says. “What we need are more producers.” She is standing in the middle of a group of pumpkins and gourds that would get loaded on the truck in a few days for market. I don’t understand—why would a producer who sold her vegetables at a market with low attendance want more producers?
At 10:39 a.m. the following Saturday, I start to understand. The sun is finally hitting the parking lot where the five booths sit, and the market is hopping, at least relative to the empty sidewalk in front of the booths an hour earlier. A man in duck boots stands at the outskirts of the action with a bag of bush beans called half runners. The Hayneses, sold out of most items, have rearranged their table to spread out what’s left beside the pumpkins in their truck and a large basket of bush beans on the ground: a small basket of jalapeños, cayennes, and banana peppers and two pumpkin rolls. A petite woman in a pantsuit ambles up and writes a check for a few peppers and half runners. An elderly woman with a trim white collar folded over a blue button-down sweater buys half runners and a small jar of jelly from another table. An elderly man with a cane and a food voucher buys a bag of half runners.

Shortly after 11:00, two young mothers fresh from a soccer game stop by quickly, their children still in the car. One suspiciously eyes the scant produce that is left while the other picks out two small green peppers and a sweet bread from Polly R Farms. A climbing guide from the climbing shop down the street who’s waiting on a late-arriving client ambles over, and Sam helps her pick out a pumpkin. A father with two children in tow stops by and chooses hummus, strawberry jam, and zucchini bread. “I’m buying something from every table,” he says in a low voice.

I grin. That’s also been my style of shopping at the market—buy a little from each vendor, trying to encourage the farmers to keep coming. I suddenly realize the irony of this. Earlier, knowing I had one of Florence’s coveted pumpkin pies already stashed in my car, I’d hovered around her table, eyeing the few pumpkin rolls she had left. I wanted to buy one, but I wondered aloud whether I should leave it for future customers. “I’ll give you the recipe,” she said, winking.

It seemed that she’d rather I left it for other customers, too. Buyers like myself and others wanted to encourage producers to keep coming to the market. Florence and the others wanted to encourage buyers to keep coming as well. It was becoming apparent that this farmers’ market—like other start-ups in other communities across the United States—wouldn’t be here without a hefty amount of faith in the enterprise from everyone involved. Producers spend the entire day before market harvesting their ripe produce and then cleaning it. On market day they wake up early to feed whatever animals they have before making the drive into town to set up a table and unload their wares. The buyers are certainly less committed than the producers, but they get dressed earlier than they normally would on a Saturday morning to make the trek down to the market in the hopes of finding some mouthwatering tomatoes
or freshly baked bread.

Starting a farmers’ market does not guarantee that it will succeed. In a seven-year study of farmers’ markets in Oregon, of 62 that opened during the study about half of them closed. The Fayetteville market wasn’t yet something to take for granted. Each party was trying to fan the flame of our little market in the hopes that more producers, more buyers, would come regularly until the whole thing could be counted on as much as those banana nut muffins I’d bought at Wal-Mart.

It had worked countless times elsewhere. Would it work in Fayetteville? At 11:27 a.m. Florence hands me a plastic container of purple, pink, and yellow flowers she was using to decorate her canopy. “You need to water them just as soon as you get home,” she says. She, Sam, and her daughter, who has recently appeared, begin breaking down their booth and loading up their old Ford F250. It has an old-style cap—dark brown, green, and white—a dent over the back right wheel, and a bumper sticker: “God Bless America.”

I take the flowers back to my car and place them carefully on the floor in front of the backseat, where early that morning I’d placed the pumpkin pie from Florence, hummus from the Morgans, granola bread from the young mother, and carrots, celery, and assorted peppers. My family had had breakfast from Wal-Mart, but they’d have lunch from the farmers’ market, and a good part of dinner would be from here, too.

In a few weeks, the producers would convene for an end-of-season meeting and unanimously vote to continue the market. Many wanted to add another day to the schedule midweek to sell produce that couldn’t keep for more than a few days.

“See you in the spring!” I said to Florence that fall Saturday. I couldn’t wait until next year.