The Farmers Market Grift

Have you ever been to a farmers market in San Antonio and wondered… where are the farmers?? Why does this farmers market only sell smoothies and organic dog treats? That’s no shade to the organic dog treats, I’m sure they’re great, but isn’t it a FARMERS market? This is something I’ve pondered for years as a consumer and double pondered this year as a producer. I covered the answer to this question partly in my previous post about the decline of the city’s public markets. To summarize in case you didn’t read it; a combination of urban renewal, federal agricultural policy and municipal incompetence completely annihilated a cherished civic institution within a matter of a few years. A similar story played out in most cities in the United States around the same time. However, fast forward to the 1990s and we’ve started to see a revival in locally grown food across the country. Today, anyone who has done any traveling in the US has likely experienced lively farmers markets in places as diverse as Portland, Detroit, New York, Burlington, and even our neighbors up in Austin, to name but a few. So I ask again, where are San Antonio’s farmers?

I’ll give the boring and obvious answer first: San Antonio is a relatively poor city, and people who don’t have a lot of money often need to economize on food. Local food is perceived as being a worse value than grocery store food, so there’s little demand. Why aren’t there more direct flights from San Antonio’s airport? Same answer, there’s just less disposable income here than other places. Now, I personally think food is a foolish thing to economize on, but the fact remains that many people would disagree with me on that.

However, I don’t accept that as the entire story. San Antonio is a massive city. The metropolitan area has almost 2.5 million people now, surely there’s a group in there somewhere the size of Burlington (population 44,573) that’s willing to prioritize local food? I have a theory to explain this I like to call the Farmers Market Grift. Allow me to explain.

We’ve been to a lot of farmers markets lately. Not so much to sell produce (most of our veggies are taken by our CSA customers currently), but rather to do a bit of boots on the ground advertising for our CSA program. We’ve been spreading our efforts around multiple markets this year to try and find where our people are at. So far we’ve been a vendor at four different farmers markets, all in different parts of town serving a wide spectrum of socioeconomic groups. And we’ve seen some sh*t, let me tell you.

We were optimistic about the first market we attended (on the city’s South Side). It was well organized and seemed to have a lot of vendors. It even claimed to require all products to be locally made. Excellent! We love the South Side and were optimistic. We were placed next to another farmer who had lots of really great looking stuff. I was jealous and doubting my skills as a gardener. Perfect tomatoes, beautiful looking jalapenos, giant potatoes, some great looking pineapples, succulent bananas… wait hold up. Bananas? Pineapples? Something was incredibly fishy here. And wait a minute, this was in early April, how on Earth do you have tomatoes and peppers already? And I’ve never heard of anyone in Texas growing giant baking potatoes. I realized everything looked super familiar, and after some asking around we figured out the answer. It was all purchased at the wholesale produce terminal. Womp womp.

So this is where the first factor comes in to play; counterfeit produce! We attended this particular market a few times and had to endure the absolute agony of watching people go up to this “farmer” and say stuff like “your tomatoes that I bought last week are so delicious, I loved them!”. My brother in Christ, that is a Roma tomato grown down in San Luis Potosi and is identical to an H-E-B tomato, but at three times the price! This South Side market is not the only one where this practice is commonplace, I’ve observed it at two popular North Side markets as well. And customers buy it because they don’t know better, they’ve been told that the market is a farmers market and make the reasonable assumption that everything there is local, even when a trained eye finds it obviously suspicious. A producer friend of ours was even banned from one of those markets from daring to ask questions about the provenance of February tomatoes (post 2021 Snowvid even). Market managers are evidently willing to tolerate outright fraud in order to have produce available throughout the year. This is clearly is an incredibly shortsighted policy. When you allow someone to sell wholesale imported produce at a market that is supposed to be a producers market, local growers can’t compete. Their produce won’t look as good and it won’t be available all the time and it will be at a higher price. Local produce can only compete on taste and, frankly, vibes. And so they find somewhere else to sell, or they get out of the business entirely.

That brings me to the other half of the Farmers Market Grift; the “artisans”. The “artisans” are the keystones species of the Farmers Market Grift ecosystem. They come in many flavors, from prepared food vendors to artists selling their work. The standout type of artist in this group are the CONartists, however. I’ll tolerate the energy healers and essential oil people, I happen to not buy into that worldview but many people do so whatever I guess. But what I can’t abide are the junk resellers. Unfortunately, many of the “local” items sold at these types of events are about as local as the junk peddled in El Mercado downtown. I’ve seen entire “curated” booths comprised entirely of made in China Amazon garbage. There’s a time and place for that kind of thing, and it’s at the Mission Flea Market, not at the farmers market. It is probably a little unfair of me to lump these all together under the label of “grift”. Some of these artisans are true artisans, and I’ve had some delicious baked good and seen some truly beautiful works of art created by passionate people (even the energy healers). But the fact remains that a “farmers market” that only sells dog treats and smoothies isn’t really much of a farmers market, and the presence of all these other vendors dilutes the experience. Once people who are interested in local food see that there aren’t really any food producers, its unlikely they will return, creating a negative feedback loop. But market managers want as many vendors as possible to pay fees, and the fact is that there’s a lot more “artisans” than there are farmers (or even “farmers”).

So how do we break San Antonio out of the Farmers Market Grift cycle? I have some ideas. If San Antonio was serious about promoting local growers it would sponsor a municipal farmers market with cheap fees and high standards for the provenance of produce. I say municipal because someone needs to run this thing at a loss for a long time before you get a critical mass of vendors and cultivate patterns of repeat visitation from customers. “But what about the Pearl?” you say? Yes very true, the Pearl has been the one lifeline to area farmers since its inception. The problem is that it’s not very accessible to new vendors (we would know, we’ve been denied there once already) and is relatively expensive and comes with a legendary amount of farmers market politics and drama (yikes). The key problem with a market like that, however, is that it exists to promote visitation to the Pearl complex itself, not to support local producers. If anyone happens to make a living off that market, it’s incidental to the market’s true purpose, real estate development. This is why we need a true public market that exists for the public good. Ideally this would be a purpose built facility like the Texas Farmers Market at Mueller in Austin, but there are other existing venues that would work just fine and dandy in the meantime. A covered outdoor space like the Joske Pavillion in Brackenridge Park comes to mind, among others. This is a chicken and the egg problem, in other words. The farmers market can’t exist without vendors, but the vendors can’t exist without a place to sell. So as much as we love farmers market culture, until San Antonio gets its act together we’ll be sticking with our CSA program as the best way for us to get our harvest to the public.