Modern Farmers Markets (draft of intro)
In real terms, human civilization began at a market around 12,000 years ago. During the Neolithic revolution, agriculture became the focus, tools were created, the world grew warmer, population expanded, trade developed, and cultures were born.
Fast forward millennia to the new United States. Desired by many for its extraordinary fertile land and waterways, it became an agrarian utopia for its immigrants (even while they restricted its bounty to the native people.)
Much of the literature about the early days of the U.S. is based on its farms, and later, its ranches. Citizen Washington is most often described as a Virginia planter. Jefferson's seed and plant research at Monticello is still heavily used today. Monroe's own farming plan grew from a simple mono crop farm (tobacco) to a more sophisticated rotating variety of food plants. Lincoln founded the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), designating universities to undertake this work in every region, which was expanded to HBCUs during the 1890s. Westerns in popular culture romanticize the cowboy, his cattle drives and lone, proud homestead. In the 20th century, Americans dug Victory Gardens during World War 2, and still speak fondly of fresh milk from nearby dairy farms delivered to the side door and summer fruit picked straight from the tree. Every town had a space for farmers to gather, with Market Roads, Streets and Squares in hundred of towns to this day.
Post 1945, the industrial world sped up, automation and long distance trucking allowed for consolidation, and suburbia pushed farms farther away from the center. By the end of the 1960s, the USDA counted fewer than 700 markets in the entire country. The total number of farmers fell each decade from the 1930s through the 1990s.
But by 2020, the USDA listed around 8,600 farmers market sites, all of whom followed a similar set of management rules and vendor characteristics. Each were managed by someone in the local community, prioritized seasonal, just-harvested products grown by neighbors who drove to a parking lot, street, or park with a table and tent. A simple design that disappeared almost entirely within an hour of the market's closing. Trash taken away, trucks heading back to the kitchen or farm, an empty parking restored. Yet, in that borrowed space, a lot happened:
Researchers suggest local food growers and direct-marketing vendors create an average of 13 full-time jobs per $1 million in revenue.
According to National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), sales of local edible farm products in 2017 totaled $11.8 billion, up from $8.7 billion in 2015.
A national consumer survey conducted in 2025 by University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Farmers Market Coalition found that a majority of Americans had attended one of these markets and felt positively about them as a result of the community and value in the people and products.
How did it happen? What made it survive the corresponding unrelenting corporatization of food that closed malls and Main Street businesses? Why do they work so well as convivial spaces even while social media does its level best to people glued to their own private entertainment? Why did reports note attendance at these sites surging during the COVID-19 pandemic, and over and over again during hundreds of localized civic interruptions and environmental disasters?
Who are these people who reinvented the farmers market concept, determinedly bringing the public back to the square in thousands of towns?
This book will share that story. The fifty year history of the U.S. modern farmers market will be told through its founders, its lofty goals, its massive challenges, and its ephemeral and long-term triumphs. And its puns. So many puns.