In my last post, I presented a list of questions you might like to ask the farmer you’re buying your market produce or CSA from. One of these questions was “Did you grow this food yourself?” At first glance, this question may appear to be irrelevant: after all, farmers’ markets are for farmers to sell the produce they’ve grown, and CSAs are for you to buy a share of the crop the farmer is growing. Right? Soon after starting my internship however, I was forced to question both of these assumptions.

Although some farmers markets bill themselves as producer-only, many markets either explicitly allow resellers, or have no stated policy. The three farmers markets we sell at require that no less than 80% of items on a stand be produced by the stand-holder themselves. In addition, there is also a special rule in place for marquee items such as berries and sweet corn: if there’s someone at market selling these items that they have grown themselves, resellers are not allowed to sell them. This sounds great in theory, but in practice these rules are rarely enforced and hence are regularly flouted.

Is it a problem having resellers at farmers markets? Peter Smith addressed this issue in an article for Good Magazine entitled “What are farmers markets for?” In this article, Smith proposes that farmers markets are less about providing a source of local, sustainable food, or supporting small-scale diversified farms, and more about encouraging conversations amongst shoppers and sellers. However, having identified this new defining purpose for markets, Smith doesn’t examine the way in which resellers contribute to it. He suggests that resellers can be part of this conversation, but based on my own experience at market I can think of two ways in which increasing numbers of resellers at markets will reduce the number and/or quality of the conversations had there.

Firstly, if a reseller is simply buying produce in bulk at auction or a food terminal, how much are they going to know about the food and how it was produced? The great value in being able to talk directly to the producer is that you can ask them any question you like about your food, and get an answer straight from the source. Secondly, the most rewarding conversations I have had with customers at market have inevitably been when I have introduced them to a vegetable they haven’t come across before. Talking with a customer about the best way to prepare garlic scapes or kohlrabi, or comparing and contrasting several different varieties of heirloom tomato not only builds a deeper connection between farmer and customer, but it also broadens customers’ food horizons. In my experience, resellers tend to skim the cream off the top of the market by focusing on high-value items such as berries, stone fruit, and sweet corn, reducing the diversity of items available, and closing this very valuable avenue for engaging in conversation.

In addition to resellers increasingly cropping up at farmers markets, it appears that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be certain of the source of the food in your weekly CSA box. One of our neighboring farms runs a very successful program that it bills as a “multi-farm CSA.” One might think that this means they partner with several other farms to distribute a share of each farm’s harvest. However, what it actually means is that they buy bulk produce from other farms, including this produce in their CSA shares to supplement what they grow themselves. (This farm also has a stand at one of the markets we attend. Their stand is usually pretty small, with not much variety, as they abide by the 80% rule, and have relatively little of their own produce to sell.) As the other farms from which they source their vegetables are local to the area, it is hard to make a case that what they are doing is inherently bad. However, it is not exactly true to the CSA model, and identifying it as such is potentially misleading. The picture becomes even murkier when you note that in addition to their vegetable shares, they offer a “fruit share” that contains both local and imported fruit, including tropical fruits such as bananas, avocados and mangoes that never grow in the local climate.

American social writer and philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” With farmers markets and CSAs exploding in popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later people would try to figure out how to grab a share of that market without going to all the effort of producing food themselves. Given this state of affairs, a question that may at first glance seem too obvious to be worth asking – “Did you grow this food?” – may be your best tool for differentiating between those who are out to turn this movement into a racket and those with whom you can have a genuine conversation about your food.

UPDATE: After this article was published, I received an e-mail from Dave Stockdale, Executive Director of CUESA, the organization that runs the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, one of the US’s largest farmers markets. He was writing in response to an inquiry I had made about the market’s policy on resellers, and informed me that as a California Certified Farmer’s Market, reselling is not allowed, and that they have a very rigorous system in place for certifying and monitoring vendors. Ontario also has a certified farmer’s market organization, Farmers Markets Ontario. However, unlike California Certified Farmers Markets, which requires that all vendors be primary producers, Farmers Markets Ontario stipulates only that a majority of vendors be primary producers.