The Athens Farmers’ Market

Country Comes to Town When Local Growers Launch a New Effort This Weekend

originally published May 14, 2008

Ask any relative newcomer to Athens: based on this town’s style, its reputation as a hip, progressive city, there have long been plenty of things you’d expect to find here, but which have taken a bit of time to show up. The past year or so has been a good one for breaking the pattern, as both the now-truly-local brewery (of course!) and the downtown arthouse cinema (duh!) have opened up. Bus routes are getting more frequent; bicycle commuters too. The local government is more serious about waste reduction, water conservation and its own energy use (little electric cars patrol downtown for trash!). These are all signs of progress, but still, great things happen in other cities, and once they arrive, Athens asks, “Where have you been all my life?”

The latest in that lineage: an ambitious good-sized farmers’ market - a place not only to buy local produce, but to socialize on a Saturday. Countless cities have markets that mean something to local residents, and this Saturday, Athens begins catching up with the pack.

No, this town has not been without markets in the past. The most constant and visible one lately has been the “Athens Green Market” held outside Big City Bread since 2001. From 2003 to 2005, a small market spent summers on College Avenue beside City Hall with the blessings of the Downtown Development Authority (but without the “organic” or “sustainable” labels affixed to the Athens Green Market). Before any of those, there was the old market held under the pavilion at the Cooperative Extension Service property on West Broad Street, just east of Hawthorne Avenue. That market closed in the 1990s after decades of service. Also, since 2001, there’s been the virtual, web-based market called Athens Locally Grown, which features weekly pick-ups of pre-ordered goods, but has never done any real advertising or promotion.

In the past year, Locally Grown saw its customer base grow more than five-fold. Organizer (and farmer) Eric Wagoner reports that a little under 200 customers at the start of the 2007 growing season, with 30–40 orders per week, “exploded” into around 1100 customers now, with about 200 orders per week. The farmers selling through Locally Grown, Wagoner says, are reporting “about $7,000 per week combined, here during the slow part of the year, when most farmers’ markets in the state aren’t even open yet.” What’s that tell you? Simple: local interest in local food is booming.

Also in 2007, Athens’ Craig Page founded a nonprofit called PLACE (Promoting Local Agriculture and Cultural Experience). Page says he began the endeavor hoping to promote the many benefits of local farms and local food, from land preservation to health and nutrition to boosting the local economy. He soon found, though, that interest was high enough - and fellow activists numerous enough - that the community-based work of promoting the concept of local food was already underway. Then Page looked for a niche. What could his new organization do? What role could it fill that wasn’t being filled? “When PLACE incorporated,” he recalls, “I started talking to people, and they were like, ’What about a farmers’ market?’ So I started saying, ’What about a farmers’ market?’”

Putting It Together

“It’s something that’s been talked about over the last few years,” Wagoner says. The Athens Green Market - successful as it’s been - is ultimately limited by the typical negatives like a lack of space to expand and inadequate parking. “There was just never any other place to go to,” Wagoner says, “and farmers being the busy people that they are, they never got up the gumption to find another location.”

Farmers are also independent-minded, Wagoner points out, so it’s been important for Page’s organization to serve as a glue to hold them all together toward a common cause. That process began with a series of “Athens food activist networking sessions” over the past year, and to some degree it has its result in the makeup of the board of directors of the new farmers’ market, which includes a handful of farmers along with Page and other activists. County extension agent Amanda Tedrow has been a key ally too, Page says, and sponsorship under the nonprofit umbrella of Common Ground Athens is part of a move toward seeking grant money to help sustain the market in future. A lot of energy went into finding a suitable location. Downtown didn’t work out for various reasons (city officials were apparently jittery about the large Downtown Development Authority parking lots along Dougherty Street), so the geographic search widened early this spring. (“I started calling the churches down Prince,” Page recalls, “and they all told me no.”) Eventually, Bishop Park was floated as a site, and all the growers were enthusiastic: it’s got plenty of parking, a covered pavilion, a basic kitchen and boasts easy accessibility from nearby neighborhoods as well as an in-town-enough location.

Still, pulling all the pieces together - and being ready to open for business at the start of the growing season - hasn’t been easy. “I’m excited,” Page says now. “It’s going to happen. I was worried in February that it wasn’t going to happen… Now that I’ve gone through the process, I can understand why it’s taken so long for Athens to get - or ’re-get’ - a farmers’ market.”

It’s All in the Name: “Local and Sustainable”

What kind of market are we talking about exactly? Its name is “Athens Farmers Market, LLC: Local and Sustainable.” You won’t see the word “organic” attached to this market, that being a designation defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that doesn’t fit well for small farmers. The market’s growers will, however, be required to follow the guidelines of the alternative “Certified Naturally Grown” designation put together by the National Organics Program (though without actually having to have that program’s stamp of approval). Prices, Page says, will reflect the growers’ sustainable-land approach - as well as what he calls the “true cost of food” - but shouldn’t be out of line with other presently available organic and sustainable foods. Growers will also come from within a 100-mile radius of Athens, and all goods for sale will be homegrown and handmade. (Rules like those are, unfortunately, necessary to prevent the pitfalls of some markets, where it’s not unheard of for goods to be trucked in.) Also, in keeping with another booming local scene, a quarter of the market’s booths are open to local craftspeople. All of the guidelines, as well as an application to join the market, are online at www.athensfarmersmarket.net.

Also on the docket: live music, cooking demonstrations, and down the line, prepared foods (though 1000faces Coffee and Luna Bread plan to make their goods available at the grand opening) and social outreach components, like apprenticeships to teach hands-on small business skills to local youth. The goal is to foster the kind of community spirit that, in Page’s words, will help to “grow local farms and local farmers.” The planned schedule for this year is to be open Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. through Nov. 16.

“I hope the community’s going to be excited about it, and it’s going to become a regular thing in Athens to get up Saturday morning and go to the market and get some good vegetables,” says market board member and new farmer Jay Payne. Signs point to Payne’s hope becoming a reality, if only because Athens appears to be reaching a critical mass of growers, activists and customers not seen in recent years - though Payne does note that “there’s been a small group of sustainable farmers here for years who’ve sort of kept it going.” Those include the growers at Mills Farm in Clarke County, Backyard Harvest in Oglethorpe County, McMullan Family Farm in Hartwell, and Sundance Farm in Danielsville - all of whom have been a part of Athens Locally Grown for years. Locally Grown’s Wagoner, though, says he’s not in the least worried about his network losing growers. Maybe they’ll set up on Saturdays, maybe they’ll stick with his weekly Thursday pick-ups, or maybe they’ll do both - it’s “not a zero-sum game,” Wagoner says. Meanwhile, he says, “I do accept that what I’ve helped put together has helped put the damper on the Saturday [Big City Bread] market, and it’s possible that the change of venue brings a group of advantages of its own.” Besides, he says, there’s too much community interest now for him to worry about competition. “From a business standpoint, it’s competition, but I really don’t look at it that way, and I think having more options to buy local food is good for everybody.”

Payne, meanwhile, points out that the local food movement is really a move back to basics, and that independence from today’s conventional large-scale agribusiness is only natural. There’s an oft-told story in small-farmer circles, he says, about a jazzed-up new sustainable organic farmer talking to an old-timer who’s been farming all his life. The new guy can’t get over his excitement with the endeavor, and the old guy says simply, “Well, I guess I’m so old-fashioned I’m ahead of the times.”

Ben Emanuel

WHAT: Athens Farmers’ Market Grand Opening
WHERE: Bishop Park
WHEN: Saturday, May 17, 8 a.m.–1 p.m.