Why everyone should shop
at Farmers’ Markets
• Farmers’ Market produce is picked ripe
and sold that day. You can taste the difference. Supermarket produce,
on the other hand, can take up to two weeks to travel from farm to
store, even in summer. Flavor and appearance can suffer.
• You can meet the farmers who grow your food, ask when it was picked, how it was grown, and ways to prepare it.
•
You’ll find unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables – those bred for
flavor, not uniform in size, or ability to travel. Growing a larger
number of varieties is ecologically smart too because it reduces crops’
vulnerability to disease.
• Farmers’ Markets put more money in
the farmers’ pockets. Commercial farmers get only twenty-five cents of
every dollar’s worth of produce sold in supermarkets. At the Farmers’
market, they get the whole dollar, then pay a small amount of rent –
often only 5 percent of sales.
• Buying locally grown produce
encourages regional farming. If farming were more widespread, we could
save fuel and resources spent on long distance shipping and reduce our
over-dependence on a handful of growing regions that may not be able to
produce high yields indefinitely.
• When produce is grown and purchased locally, the money remains in the community and stimulates the local economy.
• Working farms preserve open spaces without using tax dollars.
