It’s a muggy Thursday morning in June at the Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge, and the line in front of Eric Morrow’s booth is four deep with cheerful, chatty customers. An elderly woman with protective eyewear wants to know when Morrow’s corn will be in. A man in a suit, a defector from the nearby office park, asks the variety of the softball-size tomatoes spread across the booth’s left flank. A couple in Birkenstocks suggests crops for Morrow to grow, and they share their recipe for last week’s haul of crook-necked squash. To each, Morrow listens and replies, calling some by name while filling their eco-totes with fresh produce.
Morrow, 42, drives more than an hour each way three times a week to attend the Red Stick Famers Market’s engagements, the main gathering downtown on Saturdays, and the two suburban mid-week markets on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s time well spent, since the market provides almost half his annual income, balancing what he brings in from wholesales strawberries. His farmers market revenue has increased steadily since he became a vendor in 1998, the same year he left a career as a commodities trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to return to family land in Ponchatoula.
“I had said, ‘If I can ever get out of this rat race, I’m going home,’” he recalls. “I didn’t have any idea about what I was going to do or what I was going to sell.”
Morrow hails from seven generations of farmers, but he had serendipitously returned to Louisiana just as a new economic model centered on farmer-to-consumer sales had begun to emerge in the state and across the country. Now 12 years later, vehicles like farmers markets, farm stands and farmer-to-chef relationships have strengthened and have helped provide enough sustained income to keep many family farmers on the farm. Public sentiment for buying local has never been higher, and because overall sales are still comparatively small, the field is seen as having significant growth potential.
“Farmers markets represent 2% of all food purchases,” says Stacy Miller, executive director of the national Farmers Market Coalition. “Why can’t that be 10%?” According to FMC, there were 1,755 farmers markets in 1994, an amount that jumped to 4,685 by 2008. The USDA estimates that consumers spend $1 billion at farmers markets annually.
Three years before Morrow’s return home, the venerable Crescent City Farmers Market had opened in New Orleans. A year later, the Red Stick Market opened in Baton Rouge. Covington and Lafayette soon followed suit. Morrow’s experience with farming historically was in growing wholesale strawberries, commonplace in Ponchatoula, but he wanted to learn more about the resurgence of green markets.
“I went to Baton Rouge and met with [then Red Stick Farmers Market director] Chris Campany,” Morrow recalls. “It seemed like a great place to start.”
Held in a municipal surface lot on North Boulevard in downtown Baton Rouge, the Red Stick Farmers Market was small, but gaining traction. Morrow signed up, farming just four of his 87 acres, and bringing strawberries and fresh vegetables to the market on Saturdays. Off the bat, he liked the interaction with customers and found camaraderie with other farmers.
“It was inspirational,” he says. “You didn’t have to be a big producer to participate in the market.”
Red Stick would soon become an important piece in a larger movement in Baton Rouge. A year after Morrow joined, the city launched a master plan to revitalize downtown, which included a call for better public market space. By November 2002, the permanent Main Street Market had opened. It provided retail nodes for full-time vendors and restaurateurs, and created improved outdoor space for the green market. The effect of the permanent market has been a sustained shopping experience, and higher revenues for farmers, says Morrow.
“People come and stay. They hang out, shop with us, and go inside get something to eat,” he says. “It works well. Our sales have doubled at least.”
Copper Alvarez, executive director of the Big River Economic Agricultural Development Association, says the market’s expansion has also helped increase revenues for farmers and producers.
“We’re up to three markets a week and 75-80% of the patrons at those markets were new. Every time we open a new farmers market, the farmers gain,” she says.
Morrow credits the market for his farming experiment’s success. “I don’t know that we’d farm without it,” he says.
With more than 120 registered farm stands and farmers markets in Louisiana, the appeal of buying local has grown substantially, in part because of a vigorous public service campaign, says Commissioner of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry Mike Strain.
“We have really worked hard in the last few years to push “Buy Local” and to brand Louisiana,” Strain says. “You’re starting to see a shift in that paradigm. We’ve seen steady growth and progress among the markets.”
The increased traffic has forced farmers to “grow for the market,” a method of pacing that enables them to almost always have crops ready for consumers. It’s radically different from a wholesale model in which fields are harvested and shipped at once. Growing for the market helps a farmer who is focused on direct sales to establish both a revolving door of produce and sustained income, says Morrow.
“The tendency is to plant it all at once, but what works better is to have things in three different stages, planting, growing and harvesting,” he says. Morrow plants crops in stages—sometimes at four different two-week intervals, and takes only what’s ready to market.
Morrow adds that he and other farmers have worked out kinks in the market’s supply-demand equation.
“We’ve learned to grow enough to sustain the crowd,” he says. “You used to come and we’d be out by 10 a.m.” For his part, Morrow has increased his growing capacity from his original four acres to around 30 acres today.
One of the most popular modifiers on the menus of restaurants—especially upscale ones—is “locally grown,” as chefs and restaurateurs capitalize on current sentiment. It’s worked well in New Orleans, where foodies and tourists alike expect to see the region’s bounty on the plate.
More farmers are growing specifically to satisfy the needs of individual restaurants, as in the case of Luther and Joyce Johanningmeier, whose 15-acre Lujele Farms in Mount Hermon supplies all of the produce required by the restaurant, MiLa. Similarly, Chef John Besh buys from dozens of local farmers and producers, and even farms himself to keep his constellation of six restaurants in large supply. Besh might be the best known sustainable chef in New Orleans right now, but restaurant-farm relationships actually have been going on for decades.
Commander’s Palace Managing Partner Ti Adelaide Martin recalls Jamie Shannon, executive chef from 1991 until his death in 2001, was approached frequently by farmers.
“He’d be in a bar or somewhere and a farmer would come up to him and say, ‘Hey, I’m growing this, you think you might be interested? And Jamie would say, ‘yeah, come on by and I’ll look at it,” Martin recalls.
Shannon, a New Jersey native, was so entranced the by the idea of incorporating Louisiana ingredients in fresh, inventive ways, that he committed that 90% of ingredients would come from within 100 miles. Last year, Shannon literally became the face of the movement when the Crescent City Famers Market unveiled convenient wooden market tokens featuring his image. He had shopped and cooked at the market frequently.
Martin says Commander’s 100-mile commitment has continued under Chef Tory McPhail, and that it isn’t difficult.
“Why wouldn’t we buy from the local guy selling oysters or whatever, when ours are so good around here?” she says.
But while the farmer-to-chef model has excelled in New Orleans, it’s been slower to take off in cities like Baton Rouge, Alvarez says.
“It’s harder where the local restaurant industry is competing against chains,” she says. Still, BREADA has hosted meetings to “open up the dialogue” between chefs and farmers. The biggest issue, she says, is capacity. Chefs usually require large, consistent amounts, and many farmers only grow enough to satisfy market patrons.
Despite the impressive trajectory of small farms over the last 15 years, there are opportunities for farmers to expand their income substantially through both public and private vehicles, Miller says. One important one, she says, is to enlarge access to the market for all members of society.
“I think the growth potential is huge if there is continued investment in programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” Miller says. SNAP [formerly the federal Food Stamp program] benefits are accepted at just roughly 7% of markets, often because the smaller operations don’t have the ability to handle non-cash transactions. But if markets nationwide broadened their customer base to accommodate SNAP recipients, Miller contends, they could capture millions in new income.
Strain adds that another benefit program aimed at seniors has the potential to strengthen market sales if it were expanded. The Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program provides eligible seniors $20 in coupons annually to shop at farm stands and farmers markets. “It ought to be $20 a month,” he says. “The response has been tremendous. We’ve given out 15,387.”
Schools and hospitals are additional potential new markets for farmers, particularly as the country focuses on the obesity epidemic and preventable diseases.
“A huge thing for farmers is to have access to big institutions, and we are learning from other states about how this happens,” Alvarez says. “The problem is that in Louisiana, we don’t have a good distribution system for local foods. You have a farmer who might be taking a day to deliver to a market or restaurant, and he doesn’t have time to deliver to schools.”
Ultimately, Miller says, each farmer has to find the right combination of sustainable income streams, a formula that will vary from farm to farm, and state to state. Morrow is pleased with his business model, which balances seasonal commercial sales with a year-round presence at the market.
The former might represent half of Morrow’s income, but it falls short on the intangibles provided by the latter.
“Right away, I fell in love with the farmers market and seeing the same customers every week,” he says. “I feel lost on Saturday if I’m not in downtown Baton Rouge.
One farmer’s diary
January means a fresh start for everyone else, but for a Louisiana farmer like Eric Morrow, the New Year begins in September—after most crops wither under the August heat. Even with a whole lot of planting going on, he rarely misses a Red Stick Farmers Market in Baton Rouge. “I might miss one of two dates in August,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m there.”
SEPTEMBER
Eric Morrow celebrates the new year by prepping the ground for strawberries—newly arrived from Canadian hothouses. He’s also awaiting a final round of summer crops like tomatoes, and begins to plant cold weather crops. Strawberries—the centerpiece of his business—go into the ground toward the end of the month.
OCTOBER
Tomatoes, red beans, peas and more are ripe for the picking.
NOVEMBER
The first round of strawberries is ready for harvest. More cold crops like greens and onions are planted.
JANUARY
Time to harvest more strawberries. As some cold crops fade, the ground is prepped for planting potatoes and tomatoes in February.
MARCH
When fear of frost has generally passed, Morrow plants more hot weather crops like cucumbers and snap beans.
APRIL
Watermelons, cantaloupe, more tomatoes and squash go into the ground.
MAY
Strawberry season comes to an end.
JUNE/JULY
The summer harvest is steady, including several rounds of corn and Creole tomatoes.
