Growers Market and Community
I DON’T KNOW which my mother liked better: Brahms or fresh corn and peas. Farm stands and farmers markets were her holy grail, even if it meant driving 15 miles for three fresh tomatoes picked that day. I learned how to tell if an ear of corn was sweet and tender long before I knew how to make a bed.
The first Tuesday after Tony and I landed in Ashland, we headed to the weekly Rogue Valley Growers Market, a mile from our house. It was early April and asparagus, kale, and ramps were the stars. Foraging on his own, Tony found a cache of shiitake mushrooms that joined risotto on the dinner table. I discovered Early Purple Sprouting broccoli, a delicacy whose season came and went in a snap.
As spring ceded to summer, the weekly bounty grew larger and more colorful. Tony and the mushroom man became good friends and I got to know Red Russian kale and Mustard spinach. In mid-July, the smoke and heat dimmed the market and the festive spirit that brought neighbors together. The moment the smoke cleared and the heat abated, the market sprang back. Tables filled with tomatoes, eggplant, and pears shared the runway with humanely raised beef, goats milk, honey and more. Locally sourced tacos and empanadas vanished by noon.
The Rogue Valley Growers Market is one of almost 8,000 farmers markets nationwide, the fastest growing segment of the food marketplace. The Greenmarket Tony and I frequented in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, stocked by large farms in New Jersey and Long Island, was all about fresh produce—but not community. With over 80 vendors, the Ashland market aims for more: to create a public square around local, organic food and food artisans.
These are small farmers—in a state where 97 percent of the farms and ranches are family-owned and 1,100 farms have been operated in the same family for over 100 years; where agriculture is a top economic driver; where 80 percent of the Oregon’s agricultural production leaves the state and 40 percent leaves the country. Mirroring national trends, the average age of a farmer in Oregon has risen from 50 in 1982 to 60 in 2012. In the next two decades, two-thirds of agriculture property will be transferred from its current owners to someone new, with no guarantee the land will remain as farmland.
Earlier this week, I interviewed several farmers on my weekly trip to the Growers Market. They were eager to talk between helping customers.
“As farmers, our challenges vary from year to year,” Josh Cohen of Barking Moon Farm explained. “We don’t get to pick our challenges.”
Raising robust crops without pesticides and fertilizer is not one of these challenges, though smoke-filled summers bring new adversaries. Nor is dirt, grit, and long hours. The days when rosy-eyed city slickers saw a future in farming have passed. Twenty-four percent of all Oregon farmers in 2012 were beginning farmers, down from 32 percent ten years earlier. Finding and retaining workers—legal or illegal—willing to work long hours in isolated areas has always been a challenge; immigration raids only add fuel to the fire.
“For us, the toughest challenge has actually been scale,” said Josh, who started Barking Moon Farm with his wife, Melissa, 13 years ago, he with a degree in environmental studies and she in agriculture. The prevailing paradigm for new farmers is “get big or get out,” Josh said. He has taken a different tack. “We maxed our acreage [10 acres] in our fifth year, but it didn’t pay off financially. We decided to flip the paradigm and half our acreage.” Profits climbed.
Like fellow farmers who worry that hot, smoke-filled summers are here to stay, Josh has invested in cold weather crops. (Barking Moon grows over 50 varieties of herbs, grains, vegetables, and fruit.) “Winter is now our biggest quarter,” he said. He is riding a year-round, eat-local groundswell: names of small Oregon farms, like Barking Moon, now appear on local restaurant menus and in grocery stores, and families “subscribe” to weekly boxes of produce from community supported agriculture (CSA). Every school district in the state has a local farm-to-school program.
At Fry Family Farms, in business since 1990 and comprising 100 acres spread throughout the Rogue Valley (making it the largest local farm), diversification has been key. “People are hungry to know more about where their food comes from,” said Sianna Flowers who works for Suzi and Steve Fry. “But few will pay what it actually costs to produce the best fruit and vegetables. We make it up in other ways.”
Like Barking Moon Farm, Fry Family Farms counts on restaurants, schools, and CSA for revenue. It recently started a farm store, open every day year-round, which includes products and goods from other local growers. It has a processing kitchen that turns produce into jams, pies, and more. It runs a wholesale cut-flower farm (70 percent of cut flowers in the US are imported).
“Farming never rests,” Sianna said as she rang up mustard greens for a customer. Two of the Fry’s five young daughters have returned to work at the family farm. Sianna dreams of becoming a journalist. “What authors do you like?” she asked me, adding, “I really like Joan Didion.”
Lanita Witt and her partner Suzanne Willow have operated Willow-Witt Ranch since 1985. At their stall at the Growers Market, larger than most, there’s pork and goat meat for sale—also raw milk herd shares—along with eggs and a range of vegetables. Lanita, age 68, dispenses recipes along with produce and news. Visitors to Willow-Witt Ranch, 445 pristine acres at 5,000 feet, will find restored wetlands and forests, accommodations for farm stays, education programs, and wildlife, in addition to a model organic farm and ranch.
Witt’s parents were both children of South Texas farmers, displaced by the Great Depression. Until 2016, Lanita was a practicing ob-gyn physician along with a farmer-rancher. She now works two days a week in a clinic for the poor, a three-hour drive from Ashland. “It’s tough to work the land without a second job,” she said. These days, she’s hoping for a third: Jackson County Commissioner.
Food activist and author Michael Pollan says that farmers markets are more than places to buy food. “They’re important parts of the community. I meet my neighbors there, and I meet farmers,” he writes. He cites a recent study in which participants reported having ten times as many conversations at the farmers market than they did at the supermarket.
At the Rogue Valley Growers Market, civility is palpable. When I asked Josh Cohen about migrant workers, he quickly corrected me: “I prefer to call them Latino workers. They’re our neighbors.”
Farmers markets nationwide welcome shoppers with food stamps (today known as SNAP). At the Rogue Valley market, single mothers with young children inspect the tomatoes alongside Prius owners. When I asked May, with a toddler in a stroller and an infant in a sling, what brought her to the Growers Market, she replied, “Healthy food for my babies.” She paused. “And respect.”
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