Family farms will only survive as long as they are financially viable. By supporting local Farmer’s Markets today you are doing something proactive to help ensure that there will be farms and open space in your community for tomorrow.

Here are some great reason to shop at Farmer’s Markets:

• Produce sold at Farmer’s Markets was probably picked that day. It is fresh, crisp, and packed with flavor. As produce ages it begins to loose nutrients. Fresh produce sold at Farmer’s Markets may actually be more nutritious than produce at the grocery store.
• Local money remains in the community and stimulates the local economy.
• Working farms preserve open spaces.
• Farmers’ Markets put more money in the farmers’ pockets. Commercial farmers actually only receive about 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 around 5 percent of sales.
• You can typically meet the farmers (and their families) who grow your food, ask when it was picked, how it was grown, and ways to prepare it.
• You’ll often find some unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables – full of flavor, not uniform in size, or chosen because of their ability to travel. Growing a larger number of varieties is ecologically smart too because it reduces crops’ vulnerability to disease.
• You are paying for the produce, not the fuel for the trucks that carried it across the country.

My husband laughed at me because my home garden skills are seriously lacking. I told him that next year we can add about 300 square feet of lawn to our backyard. Thank goodness for Farmer’s Markets!