Market Science
Last week I began seeing links to an article titled, Understanding the relevance of farmers’ markets from 1955 to 2022: A bibliometric review which was being posted by a variety of agriculturally related organizations. Then a few of my academic regulars mentioned the article. It was easily found online so I pulled it up to see what all the fuss was about.
Published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Research which is a peer-reviewed open access journal covering a variety of agricultural sciences, I was ready to learn something new about farmers markets. Headed up by agricultural researchers from the USDA, American universities and other esteemed institutions from around the world, maybe the article would shed more light on to the state of farmers markets and in what direction they are heading. Afterall, I like to keep my finger on the pulse of all things farmers market.
The title should have been a tip-off, A bibliometric review, which basically meant the researchers only read articles about farmers markets and then postulated their theories from the articles. Next, the authors of the article were all from Budapest. I’ve got nothing against Hungarians, but how do Hungarian researchers legitimately write about American farmers markets?
But I was determined to slog my way through the abstract, the empirical literature, the methodology, tables, graphics, and results. Here’s what I found.
There’s a growing trend about writing about farmers markets. Yes folks, more articles are being published about the growing trend of farmers markets, food safety, local economies, shorter supply chains, sustainability, and policy making. I thought to myself that the authors must be younger than twenty-five and just discovered farmers markets on their way home from clubbing all night. Don’t laugh. I used to go to a market near the heart of the club district in the District and can’t tell you how many times still inebriated clubbers stumbled into the farmers market and remarked it was just like an outdoor supermarket. Um, not quite.
Of course, the introduction began with fearmongering—food safety scandals, supply chains—and then went downhill from there citing the downfall of farmers markets in Anglocentric countries due to the rise of supermarkets, giving credit to the farm bill for the gradual return of SFSCs, their parlance for short food supply chains. I guess that makes us CFMSFSC. Hey Mitch, put that on a tee-shirt!
From their research it sounded as if the local food supply had completely died and was resurrected in the 1970’s to re-emerge like a brood of cicadas once hipsters were ready for fresh fruits and vegetables, artisan breads, and organic meats again. The European version was referred to as self-provisioning practices which I guess means putting in your own gardens and orchards and raising your own meats. Last week a customer brought me some lovely salad greens she’d grown in her garden only a few blocks away from the market location. Even in the city one can be self-provisioning.
The researchers’ bibliographic analysis used scientific mapping and network analysis to investigate what people were writing about farmers markets. I’ve got a better idea—why don’t you actually map farmers markets. This year three long time regional farmers markets closed down for good, but I’m still seeing them listed in online farmers market databases. Last year when a national nonprofit conducted their annual Best Farmers Markets contest, there were farmers markets listed in the voting that had been closed for years. YEARS! Yes, the USDA would rather study who is writing about farmers markets instead of actually studying the markets themselves. Sounds about right.
One tidbit of information that really stuck in my craw was the assumption that “the boundaries associated with small-scale producers (vendors) and consumers are well-defined.” This was the clincher for me to know the authors knew absolutely nothing about modern farmers markets, nor did the people writing about them.
A farmers market is one gigantic Gaussian economy. Few write about it because one has to live it. Vendors shop with one another each week for both our personal as well as professional goods. Come early enough and you’ll see the prepared food vendors purchasing their fresh ingredients for that day or for next week’s offerings. Does that make them a vendor or a customer? And what about vendors who dine at the local chef’s restaurant? Let me tell you, that’s always a phenomenal meal and a fun experience. And what about when customers meet at the farmers market and then go on to procure each other’s goods or services? Recently one of my customers, a lactation coach met another customer, quite visibly pregnant while both were purchasing their weekly items. Guess who was in line behind both of them—the OBGYN! Talk about one big happy family in a small community.
Other bits of misinformation in the article included the assumption that more women shop at the farmers market than men due to our gender roles. This is flat out wrong. Men have finally got with the program, doing the market shopping while giving the gals the morning to themselves. Single men, married men, fathers, boyfriends, you name it—they’re the ones out there every week with their lists and shopping bags, often with kids in tow. And it’s been that way for years. YEARS!
Evidently, the rise in publications about farmers markets is related to “agri-food supply chains in general.” No kidding. Do you think the academics and political types are starting to get nervous about the global food supply? Who is really paying attention to the rise in crop decimating fungi and insects ravaging monocrops such as bananas, coffee, and cocoa. There’s going to be some angry consumers when those commodities are no longer widely available. There was a brief mention about what COVID19 did to the supply chain as well. I think our farmers markets handled that quite well, but for the researchers the world nearly ended.
My favorite piece of the whole article was the Thematic evolution of key words figure as I’m a stickler for the overuse of buzzwords and marketing speak by people who have never shopped at a farmers market but love to write about it. From the 1950’s through 1999 we just wrote about farmers markets but starting in 2000 (ironically when I purchased my first farm) our publications began focusing on food, agriculture, certifications, and consumer attitudes. Twenty two years later we’ve expanded to include regular topics such as nutrition, climate change, food justice, and antibiotic resistance. There’s also rural development, social capital, agroecology, and public health. Completely absent was the word regenerative which must be too new for anyone to have written enough about for the researchers to pick up on it.
Overall, the researchers found that farmers market related publications require an interdisciplinary and holistic approach. Kind of like farming, imagine that.