The days dwindle down to a precious few, and so do the farmers, and finally the Athens Farmers Market2.0 will come to a close this Saturday, Nov. 14. This second year of the market has been a good run, beginning in May. Two or three Saturdays were marred by rain—a mixed blessing, since we all, most especially the farmers, need it. The farmers market was definitely a build-it-and-they-will-come leap of faith back in the spring of 2008, when Craig Page of P.L.A.C.E. (Promoting Local Agriculture and Cultural Experience) announced that his group was planning to start up the project. A lot of people were skeptical, including this interpreter of the local scene. It hadn’t worked very well downtown, in that central location, so how could it work way out at Bishop Park?

The first-ever time they launched it, the people came in droves, only to find few farmers. But word got around in the country, and the next week the farmers showed up and began making some money. Then the organizers had to move the location from the area down below the gym over to the basketball courts. Wrong move, thought this chronicler of our town. Wrong again. The BB courts proved to be a perfect place for everybody but the Saturday morning basketball players.

As readers of this paper can’t help but know, there’s a lot of interest here in locally grown food, and there are a lot of local food growers. There are weekly pickups of farm-grown food, visits to farms and local restaurants serving vegetables and meat fresh from the farm. The Athens Farmers Market has proven to be a vital focal point in bringing the buyers and sellers together and creating an interdependence that all have come to rely on for better table fare and increased income.

People like Craig and Jerry Nesmith have given every Saturday and more to making the market work, and this year’s manager, Donn Cooper, has proven adept at drafting his friends for early morning work in the cause. The farmers needed this mechanism but probably wouldn’t have been able to put it together themselves, since it’s hard to attend organizational meetings and dig sweet potatoes at the same time.

One of the salient points about Athens is that there is a large concentration of well educated, well-to-do citizens along with a lot of younger people open to new ideas and ways of doing things. These are the creative and cool cohort that make Athens such an interesting place to be. They’re not all able to grow a carrot, but they can flat appreciate somebody who does. That’s what makes the farmers market work so well.

A limitation on the outstanding success of the farmers market is that the vegetables and other items cost more than the factory-farm fare in the supermarkets. They cost more, that is, in out-of-pocket expense, though the supermarket stuff from the giant farms is subsidized in various ways by our own tax dollars and probably costs a lot more than the locally grown, if the whole bill were added up.

Even so, this means that the farmers market’s customers are primarily upscale, with few drawn from the large population of poverty-level people living in Athens. Now that the farmers market is a proven success and assuming it’s even stronger next year, maybe the producers of this agricultural bounty and the organizers of its market can figure out a way to cut in the wider, poorer community. Maybe there’s some way that at the end of the day the produce can go toward bringing the benefits of healthier, more nourishing locally grown foods to a wider group. I don’t know whether something like that would work, but that doesn’t mean anything, because I didn’t even think the farmers market would work. I bet there’s somebody who is already figuring it out.

Pete McCommons

editor@flagpole.com