Buy Fruit, Save a Farm

Increasingly, Farmers Markets Keep Growers Going

In the early 1980s, Mark Toigo began making weekly trips from his family's farm to farmers markets with a pickup truck full of peaches, cherries, apricots and, as the summer faded, apples and pears. On a good day, he'd come home with $1,000.

The produce he took to the farmers markets was "probably 1 percent of everything that came off the farm," he says. But it accounted for "as much or more money than all the rest of the crops put together."

A quarter-century later, as Toigo sends trucks full of fruit to the Arlington Farmers Market, elsewhere in Virginia and Baltimore, it's still true. "When we sell apples, I'm lucky to get eight to 10 cents a pound for premium fruit" from processors, he says. "But I'll make a dollar and a half a pound selling at farmers markets."

All over America, farmers markets are saving family farms. "It's fairly clear there's no future for our family in traditional agriculture," says Toigo, a south-central Pennsylvania fruit and vegetable farmer. "If it weren't for farmers markets, there never would have been a chance for me and thousands of other people like me to farm."

Like Toigo, a growing number of American farmers are staying in business by selling directly to consumers. In 2000, the last year for which figures are available, 19,000 farmers were selling their produce only at farmers markets, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service.

Why? Farmers make more money selling retail. They can set their own prices. They can sell a much higher percentage of their crop -- including the bruised or less than perfectly shaped peaches and tomatoes and potatoes that supermarkets reject. They can have more control over their finances.

And with more money, farmers can maintain and even upgrade their farms. They can send their children to college. They can hold onto their land and livelihood, paying their bills and resisting pressure from developers who covet their land.

Chip Planck, a Loudoun County farmer who has sold exclusively at farmers markets for more than two decades, says the markets make it possible to maintain his property as farmland. "It's not so much that developers would have forced us to sell out," he says. "Developers don't force anyone to do anything. It's that we would have had to earn income otherwise to pay the mortgage."

He finds selling at farmers markets "greatly satisfying." "You hear [customers'] appreciation, their cooking ideas, the things you do right or wrong," says the vegetable and small-fruit grower who farms with his wife, Susan. "It's valuable for our workers, too, that the things they have actually planted, weeded and picked are theirs to present and get compliments on."

It wasn't always that way.

The post-World War II rush to convenience foods wasn't fertile ground for the leisurely, neighborly shopping style of farmers markets. New refrigerated trucks ferried oranges from Florida or tomatoes from California across the country, making local produce less necessary. Then, in the 1960s and early 1970s, an increasing number of women entered the workforce and had little time to shop more than once a week.

If farmers markets were to thrive, there had to be a revolution. Consumers had to value and seek out fresh, local seasonal produce. That began to happen in the 1970s, with restaurants such as Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and Nora Pouillon's Restaurant Nora in Washington leading the way.