[Nirvana]

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

PART III --- THE FAMILY FARMER

Urban life can be stressful. Competition is intense. Large densities of people are crammed into small spaces and the interaction results in frequent conflict. Many of those residents have roots in rural America or rural whatever country you can name. Many of those roots are generations back but recollections of the past are buried in the folklore passed from generation to generation. Sometimes folklore turns into myth and myth into an idealized vision of how things ought to be. This nostalgia and longing for simpler times has given forth to the rebirth of the idea of OLD MACDONALD’S FARM where the cows in the meadow and the sheep are in the corn.



The real life extension of OLD MACDONALD’S FARM is today’s farmers market. No one would question the premise that fresher produce tastes better or that locally raised produce rushed to market is preferred mode as advocated by the Localvores. The urban consumer’s need for food with a story behind it, created such a marketing opportunity that it brought forth all the scams found in a local carnival. Middlemen moved into the fray and all of a sudden you had an onslaught of people representing themselves as family farmers and their products as locally grown and organic. Because the venue would change and the instant shops would come and go, regulation was difficult. Misrepresentation was rampant.



The tools of the trade are fairly simple and limited. The seller of food at the farmer’s market must:

1. Pretend to be a family farmer to the consumer whatever that means.

2. Subscribe to notion that the foods that are sold are natural or organic whatever that means. The bonafides are frequently displayed on the tables in front of the stall in the form of acceptable literature and billboards.

3. Charge at least twice as much as the food sells for at the local grocery.

A visit by this reporter to a farmer’s market in La Jolla, California illustrates the point in this photo.