Saturday at the Gardener's Market

Farmers Market

            My experience at the farmers market last weekend was similar to other times I’ve attended. I appreciate the farmers market because I appreciate entrepreneurial work environments and people who own farms, privately or commercially, are especially hard workers. This is made extremely evident each time I attend. I went to the Gardeners Market at Willow Park in Logan to speak with agriculture and craftsmanship enthusiasts.

            When I arrived at the market, I first made a quick round and counted all of the booths. I counted forty of them. I noted two commercial, one plant, seventeen farm-related, and twenty non-farm related (craft) booths. Also, there were seven food vendors, totaling the number of booths to forty-seven. The first booth I visited was the manager’s booth. It wasn’t marked with a name, so I wouldn’t have known it was the manager’s booth if they hadn’t told me. There were two women handling all of the questions. They had an assortment of flower arrangements and small garden produce on a table before them. I began speaking with them and asking questions about the farmers market. They told me the Gardeners Market was sponsored by SAABRE and there were only three rules laid in stone. First, everything at each booth must be grown by the owner, meaning they can’t buy it from anyone else. They explained it in terms of plagiarism. Basically, you can’t plagiarize your vegetables and take credit for growing them yourself. The second rule was that each person selling any perishables must abide by the rules and regulations set out by the Bear River Health Department, and further, the FDAA. Third, depending on selling loyalty and food demand, you may only work the farmers market if you are a local resident of Cache Valley, and since they reiterated this rule a few times, I am guessing that it is important to the ambience and purpose of the farmers market. 

            I didn’t see any animal-specific booths, though there were plenty of animal bi-products being sold. There was a booth devoted specifically to organic eggs. I particularly noticed this booth because written all over it were words meant to draw visitors in. They were words and phrases like “fresh”, “home-grown”, “free-range”, and “no hormones used”. On the side of the booth, there was even a caption that read “Chickens are happy, non-caged, and never given hormone injections.” I think it’s interesting that we are rejecting the idea of commercialism and embracing an old-fashioned way of life, closer to the days before GMOs and man’s interruption of agriculture being agriculture instead of manipulated science. A few of the booths were handing out brochures, but I noticed that the ones who were weren’t getting many results. They were mostly just holding out their hands, hoping shoppers would take their pamphlets. Not many did.

            I spoke with a lot of people who weren’t actually the owners of their own farm. There were many children selling different things the booths had to offer. Most of the people manning the booths were between the ages of twenty and forty, but I did speak with a small girl, maybe nine years old, who had extensive knowledge about bee keeping. Her family sold fresh honey and she kept telling me random facts about bees. Housed between two sheets of glass and some honeycomb were some bees. She told me that they spent all day trying to impress the queen, that bees really are ruled under a matriarchy, and that they have two stomachs—one for pollinating, one for digestion. It was amazing to me that she knew so much. Since the company (and it seemed like a larger, very successful company) was her family’s livelihood, it makes perfect sense that she would be so knowledgeable about it. She has obviously grown up around it and it has created a certain culture for her; this is what she will always understand.

            There are plenty of differences in price range. When I compared some of the food, especially the organic stuff, to food I could’ve bought at the grocery store, the farmers market food was exponentially more expensive. The egg booth that I saw was selling eggs $6 per five eggs. Wal-Mart sells a dozen eggs for around $3, give or take fifty cents. I have determined that produce is more expensive at the farmers market because in order to keep animals who are making these products healthy, they must keep throwing money at the different resources. Things get complicated when you make produce organic—something I’ve never thought of until now.

            As far as ambiance goes, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I appreciated the live music and the people buzzing around me, talking about their crops and daily life in a rural city. The music was very bluegrass-y and I felt that it was very fitting for the demographic, which was people of all ages, trying to reconnect with their community at the end of a long work week.