From church parking lot to six locations: the origins of our local farmers markets

Adam Buchsbaum
Editorial Intern

It is July 4, 1980, and 12 farmers are set up in a church parking lot. It is the first farmers market to open up in the Long Beach area. Dale Whitney, pastor for the local Presbyterian church, emceed for the event and worked with the church team to make this day happen. More farmers markets followed, and soon there were three.
It is June 2012. Dale Whitney is now the market manager, overseeing a total of six markets known collectively as the Harbor Area Farmers Markets (HAFM). He is now at the Thursday Bixby Knolls market in sunglasses and a straw hat as farmers proudly share samples and make conversation with potential customers strolling the street. The nonprofit South Coast Interfaith Council (SCIC) sponsors this and all the other HAFM markets. Whitney reports to the SCIC and consults with an advisory board. Day-to-day, he organizes the markets.
The day begins two hours before the given market opens. Whitney— or one of his other managers— and fellow workers set up for the day of business. The trash cans are set out. The sign disallowing house pets pops up. The information table with tote bags and recipe books (using market ingredients) appears. The manager checks that each farmer has his or her state-sponsored Certified Producer’s Certificate out. “That shows their customer it is a real farmer, and, if an inspector comes, that’s the first thing he’s going to want to see,” Whitney explained. “And it’s required that it is conspicuously displayed.”
The manager confirms each farmer is in his or her properly assigned location. The spatial hierarchy goes by seniority; the veterans receive the best sales spots. “There will already be farmers there in their spots that they’re used to but if there are any last-minute adjustments or friction between farmers because of boundary lines, that’s one of the first things…to make sure people are abiding by,” Whitney explained. “The manager basically gets there to make sure everybody’s in their best spot and the area is properly secured.”

Then it all begins. The customers arrive, and the manager oversees more day-to-day issues, helping customers as needed. The market caters to not only well-heeled foodies, but the needy. The markets are all equipped as needed to service low-income customers through social programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program. The market also participates in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (known as WIC) to provide $20 of redeemable vouchers at participating vendors. “We’ve always done [SNAP], and have even created our own (programs) that benefit lower-income folk,” Whitney said. For example, the HAFM created a program to provide coupons to persons above the age of 55 and with a disability.
Few may know that the farmers markets system began with a social-justice mission. It was the early ’70s. The now-defunct Interfaith Hunger Coalition was concerned with the rise of food deserts in low-income neighborhoods, i.e. places without easy access to healthy and affordable produce, often from poor transportation and a scarcity of quality supermarkets. The recent 1965 Watts Riots had decimated South Los Angeles. “Supermarkets were burned down and never went back,” Whitney explained. “There were nothing but liquor stores, with maybe bananas and apples and oranges, and all the rest is junk food.”
Simultaneously, the rise of agribusiness was pushing small, family farms out of business. “Without alternative marketing channels, the small family farmer was getting eaten up. They turned their stuff over to the packing house, and then they’d be sent a bill,” Whitney exclaimed. “They wouldn’t make any money because the packing house charges for picking and transporting and gobbledygook.” Farmers struggled to survive.
Yet state regulations had prohibited farmers and customers from gathering outside a commercial market. In response to farmer protest, then Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order. “It established the current system of Certified Farmers Markets as you see them,” Whitney said. Markets began opening in underserved neighborhoods, targeted at low-income shoppers. Farmers markets were mutually beneficial; they provided farmers with much needed, more direct income, and provided the poor with access to good, fresh produce.
It is June 2012. The first fruits of summer have arrived. The stone fruits— the ones with pits— are always first, Whitney explains. Peaches have cropped up. Cherries, apricots, nectarines and plums also come with the summer, though they haven’t quite come in, save for one— the small and hard unripe plums mostly consumed by Middle Easterners.
The Thursday Bixby Knolls market has a speciality item of its own, a Filipino dish: balut. “It’s a chicken or a duck egg that’s been fertilized, and the embryo is allowed to develop for a couple of weeks, and then it’s growth is arrested inside the egg…so what you got is something that’s not a yolk inside the egg. It’s actually embryonic chicken,” Whitney explained. “If you can imagine a hard-boiled egg that’s crunchy when you eat it, you’re getting close to what balut is.” Meanwhile, Tenerelli Orchards over in Littlerock will return in July after a brutal cold wiped out their crops last year.
Whitney is in sunglasses and a straw hat. There are six markets now under the SCIC. Fruit samples spiked with toothpicks sit in small plastic cups. Recipe books wait at the information table. Conversation is made. “There’s no comparison between a juicy, tasty peach or a plum…compared to the hard, ‘plastic’ but beautiful red plums for 39 cents a pound at the supermarket,” Whitney said. The market continues on as ever, 32 years strong.