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 How Design Can Help Farmers’ Markets Feed a Growing Demand
http://www.good.is/post/how-design-can-help-farmers-markets-feed-a-growing-demand/
    * Posted by: Alissa Walker
    * on August 10, 2009 at 8:43 am

A century ago, you probably wouldn’t have spent your Saturday morning lugging 
local produce back from a farmers’ market because chances were, like the 
other 95 percent of America, you lived on a farm. But today the numbers are 
flipped:  Now most of our country’s population lives in cities, and less than 
1 percent of our population are farmers. For any major city, it’s the same 
story: As our food production slips further and further afield, our urban 
residents have suffered—physically and economically—from a lack of access to 
fresh fruits and vegetables. Luckily, according to a story about farmers’ 
markets in our 12th issue, the number of markets nationwide is almost 5,000 
(up from 1,755 in 1994) which certainly demonstrates that demand for local, 
fresh food has increased. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen my 
local farmers’ market so crowded. But even as a cultural shift has occurred 
in our relationship with food, the open-air farmers’ market as we know it 
hasn’t changed all that much in the last 30 years. How will these local 
farmers continue to supply our urban demands?

Thirty years ago, Vance Corum was one of the founders of the first authorized 
farmers’ market in California, which opened in Gardena in 1979. The weekly, 
open-air market became a model for farmers’ markets across the state and 
rippled inland. “Farmers’ markets are coming of age. Customers want 
beautiful, abundant marketplaces and farmers need large crowds of people,” he 
says. “Farmers have plenty of production; the challenge is for us to create 
strong markets in cities and towns across America that recreate and improve 
upon the local food systems of the past.” But to serve those crowds, the 
traditional market is begging for innovation at every stage, from pieces that 
can aid the loading, packing, and transporting of foods, as well as the 
vending systems, which Corum says farmers have been ingeniously building 
themselves. “What would be especially valuable is a compact, easy to 
assemble, interlocking table and display system that is flexible, strong and 
rigid to show off two or three tiers of product on a slant.”

Due to the locations and accessibility of farmers’ markets, fresh fruits and 
vegetables aren’t always reaching the often-underserved communities who most 
need affordable, healthy produce. Mobile produce vehicles are finding their 
ways into cities as a cheap and efficient way to bring produce to the people. 
The Greener Grocer’s Veggie Van delivers its wares on the streets of 
Columbus, Ohio, and is equipped with technology to accept credit cards and 
EBT credit, the electronic equivalent of food stamps. Small business 
advocates Mercy Corps worked with the branding agency Saatchi & Saatchi 
helped to design food carts in Jakarta to help vendors make healthy snacks as 
attractive as ice cream trucks. And there are many farm-to-school programs 
like the one in Santa Monica, California where the public school district has 
bought farmers’ market produce for their salad bars for 11 years. Corum says 
even kids really do know the difference: “When really fresh farmers’ market 
produce was substituted for produce from the wholesale terminal, the number 
of kids choosing the salad bar quintupled from eight percent to forty 
percent.”

Even if farmers can get their produce to a local, temporary market they’re 
still selling at smaller scales—farmers’ markets themselves only move about 
1% of the food consumed in the United States—and their audience is mostly 
single families and chefs for smaller restaurants. Websites like Foodzie—an 
online farmers market where small food producers and growers can sell their 
product—might help, but for farmers who want to move larger quantities of 
produce, getting local tomatoes made into local tomato sauce, for example, is 
extremely difficult. “Currently the potential supply of local food is 
restricted by an economically monolithic system of production, processing and 
distribution,” says Vanessa Zajfen, program manager for The Urban & 
Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. So, 
especially for large metropolitan areas, there’s the need for a “hub,” or 
terminal, for local farmers to deliver, distribute and process their produce.

“We need market designs that will provide year-round direct marketing 
opportunities for farmers and create vibrant public spaces with food at its 
core,” says Zajfen, who points to a space like the Santa Caterina Market in 
Barcelona, Spain, which received a beautiful renovation and shimmery ceramic 
roof by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue in 2005. The Barcelona market 
functions as not only a wholesale terminal, but a beloved retail and dining 
destination where local food is processed into delectable tapas served under 
the same roof. “This is the oldest market in Barcelona; it was opened in 
1848,” she says. “Its modern redesign has kept this market relevant and 
functional.” (For more innovative permanent market designs, see Peter Smith’s 
story on GOOD: “The Public Market Renaissance.”)

A contemporary answer to Barcelona’s example might be the New City Market, a 
concept by Vancouver-based citylab, that will create a 21,000 sq. ft. 
year-round indoor-outdoor farmers market, wholesale food distribution, 
commercial processing facility, business development, local food advocacy 
and, conference space, and will also push the form when it comes to 
sustainability. A market like this could be at the center of a sustainable 
food policy for a city, like the one recently unveiled in San Francisco. 
Instead of the traditional farmers’ market channel, farmers would have 
multiple options to sell to consumers, says Zafjen. “A shift in our system of 
food delivery to an increased variety of direct marketing methods would be an 
important step in the development of a sustainable regional food system.”

Of course, another option is bringing those rural farms closer to the people. 
Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farms concepts, towering skyscraper greenhouses 
in high-density areas, and the The Science Barge (above), a floating 
sustainable farm in New York, are both non-traditional ways that family 
farmers could produce and deliver their food to growing city populations. And 
there are hundreds of outdoor classrooms across the country that bring food 
production right into schools, the most famous being Alice Waters’s Edible 
Schoolyard in Berkeley, California. These teaching gardens tap the engaged 
expertise of community chefs, producing local food that can be given back or 
sold to neighborhood restaurants. And they might even be recruiting a few 
future farmers along the way.