Meirl

I’ve seen a couple of local news organizations bust sellers at farmers markets for reselling veggies that they bought at Walmart. So, sometimes it’s that you’re adding a middleman.

Never understood why it’s like that

I know all the comments are going to justify it but it’s basically the same thing as thrift stores, demand increased.  In the 90s farmers markets were at least half price for better quality.  You could fill up 3 grocery bags for like 6 bucks.

It’s all about scale and specialization. The farmer’s market is small-scale operations where everything is done by a single person or family. This leads to inefficiency and poor return on investment.

Big scale operations are cheaper because they can exploit cheap labor, have specialized process and roles, and move a lot more product. With all of these factors, their margins are much much better, so they can afford to bring the cost down.

Or when you find out the biggest farmer’s market in your area is forced to fact-check their vendors because there’s always scammers showing up who just load up produce from a sea container depot and attempt to fake being farmers

People who grow vegetables on a small scale tend not to use herbicides or pesticides. Costs you more for no chemicals, fresher and better taste. Great if you can afford it, otherwise supermarket shit.

its because a lot of people are underpaid and exploited in the agricultural industry. the veggies you get at walmart involve a lot of cost-cutting measures. a small local farmer pays all that overhead and labor themself. its the same reason why you can buy a cheap sweater off amazon for 5 dollars or buy a handmade sweater from an artisan for 100+ dollars. the more middlemen involved, the more alienated the laborers are from the work theyre involved in, and the price reflects that.

Ever since they became popular people upped the prices. But I will say that my own experience with fellow Hispanic and Asian sellers is that they will give you a lot more veggies at a lower price.

But I will never pay $12 for my homemade brownies or fruity loaves of bread sorry.

Like beer from a brewery. Why am I still paying $5 a pint when I’m at the source? The company isn’t paying for advertising, labeling, shipping, distributors, etc. yet here I am paying the exact same price if I bought the beer across the state at a random bar.

Looking at you, Rogue Brewery Newport Oregon

My favorite part is when the *”farmers”* buy produce from the same wholesalers as my supermarket.

consumers when confronted with the economy of scale:

Considering the state of America at the moment, this summer’s farmers markets might feel like a bargain.

big grocery often sell fresh at a loss, get you on the other stuff

Because they can’t afford to make them cheaper like the big chains do

Oh boy we could have a whole conversation about how the US food system is completely backwards, how the whole economy incentives are towards replacing human labor with capital as much as possible and the negative impacts that has on the land, human health and wellbeing, communities, climate, biodiversity, etc… Farming at a small scale with less capital and more labor is more expensive in this system. Which is a totally ass backwards way of existing. So ya don’t get mad at your local farmers for prices. Bankers, developers, heavy equipment cartels, chemical cartels, food processing cartels, and politicians have been making it this way for the last 100 years.

One thing you can do if you want cheaper veggies is find a CSA that does work-trade. That way, you can get out in the field once a week, make new friends, connect with the land, learn some skills, and get cheap veggies!

Scale can do wonders for costs. Plus subsidies.

But also, think of farmers markets like artisan veggie sellers, and it starts to make more sense. Art costs more when you cut out middle men too. Even like, buying something from a local artist where you’re just paying labour and supplies, that’s way more than the mass produced art you get at home decor stores. And that makes sense to us. The scale and method let the mass produced stuff cost less.

If farmers at the market could confidently sell as much product there as they do selling wholesale to walmart, they could probably undercut the price walmart sells for. But they can only bring so much, and sell so much, etc. So they gotta make it worth the day by charging more.

If you’re buying from legit, local, small farmers, you’re likely buying a higher quality product. It is also more expensive per unit to operate on a smaller scale. So you’re buying a higher quality product that was more expensive to grow. It has little to do with “the middle man”. If you were buying the same rock hard Roma tomatoes you get at Target from the Agricorp TM campus in Mexico it’s probably be cheaper per unit. That if you can afford to buy say 20000 pounds. But then it wasn’t cheaper after all, was it.

You’re also usually buying product that was harvested when ripe and not showered with buckets of synthetic chemicals. So you usually get softer, tastier fruits and veg for your investment.

I always try to get the growers business card. They usually have better prices and are willing to trade, outside of the market hours.

It’s cuz they have to pay stupid amounts of money for the space at those markets.

Quality is usually better, you can still buy it from the grocery store if you choose

I don’t know what “farmer’s markets” you attend, but I’ve *NEVER* paid more for a vegetable *EVER* at a farmer’s market. *EVER*.

The farmer’s markert has local sellers that produce product at a small scale

That means that their production costs are very high relative to the amount of product they sell

At the supermarket however you have products from large companies that mass produce the product

Since they mass produce at such a huge scale, manufacturing costs for them are MUCH lower relative to the amount of product sold than the local farmer.

In layman’s terms: stuff is cheaper when you buy it in bulk, right?

Well, corporations constantly buy stuff in bulk such as chicken feed, etc so they pay MUCH less to raise a chicken than your local farmer that’s gonna have just a few chickens because buying 5000 tonnes of chicken feed meqns you pay way less per kg of chicken feed than if you were to buy 50 tonnes

So, the corporation can sell their chickens for a fraction of the cost as the local farmers and STILL profit more from each chicken than the farmer.

Add to this all sorts of methods of cost cutting you can do in mass production that os not viable for local farmers and yoi have pur current situation

THAT’S why the local farmer prices are so high by comparison and its not the farmers being greedy or their fault in any way

✨economies of scale ✨