Farmers Market Trolling: Pt. 1 City’s Farm Market

Posted on Jul 16 in Life in Evansvilleby TalinaPrint

Over the weekend (last weekend) we went farmer’s market trolling. Mainly because the time had come to pickup our July meat share and the pickup point was at the city’s farmer’s market.

Our impression of the city’s farmer’s market wasn’t good based upon the previous years that we’ve frequented. Our main issue was that the stuff wasn’t farmed by the “farmers” who had booths at the market.

Specifically, food was shipped in from other (far away places) and consumers had no way of knowing what was and wasn’t locally farmed. In a nutshell, the “farmers” were scamming people by setting up farm stands, displaying produce and selling it to those who assumed they were supporting local farmers in attending a “farmer’s market”

Some stuff even had produce stickers (like in the grocery stores) displaying sku numbers and indicating where the food actually came from, which is what tipped us off to the non-locally grown issue.

It’s seriously disappointing to think you are attending and supporting a farmer’s market when you were only buying produce that came from the same places grocery stores got their stuff, from hundreds and thousands of miles away. What is worse is the posing “farmers” and the false marketing of the event.

Needless to say, we hadn’t returned the city’s farmers market after realizing very little that was for sale was actually farmed by those selling the goods … until this weekend.

I was pleasantly surprised by the growth of the city’s farmer’s market. In previous years it’s been a sad event with few vendors. This year there were many more people selling.

While there were still the “posing” farmers and the pointless booths selling off topic or useless things we did notice many actual local farmers selling.

We bought corn from and older guy that farms his corn just up the high way from us.

N also bought a pretty arrangement of cut flowers nestled in an older milk pitcher, as my anniversary flowers. They were lovely.

We also bought a melon and some peaches from a local grower.

Turns out this years market has been encouraged to display signage indicating a local product or a local farm. There were at least 5 local farm booths and it seemed there were about 12-15 total booths set up on Friday morning when we attended.

Here is a slideshow of all the booths I photographed:

There were still all kinds of booths not displaying info about them being local and we did still spot sku numbers and stickers on things some people were selling.

We just were adamant about asking where the food came from and we only bought what was locally raised. All in all the County’s Farmer’s Market has grown in positive ways in the last few years it seems.

Since this post has become rather long I’ve split it in to two parts. Say tuned for part 2 tomorrow, Penny Lane’s Local ONLY market!