Farmers markets grow with yen for local crops

Bedford, Winchester among 20 new arrivals

Strawberries at the Bedford Farmers' Market. (Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)

Most Tuesday afternoons last summer, Susan Grieb and friends from Bedford cycled to the Lexington Farmers' Market. "I loved the sense of community," said Grieb, a former software engineer and development manager, who determined to bring the same mix of fun and fresh food to her hometown.

After seven months of planning, fund-raising, visits to potential vendors, and presentations to town officials by Grieb and co-managers Moira Sarson and Barbara Purchia, the Bedford Farmers' Market celebrated Opening Day last Monday.

Bedford and Winchester are among 20 new markets this year in Massachusetts - the largest growth in numbers on record, said David Webber, the farmers market coordinator for the state Department of Agricultural Resources. Since 1978, the number of markets statewide has grown from 10 to more than 160, he said.

Escalating fuel prices, environmental concerns, and questions about the food supply and the downside of industrial agriculture raised by books including Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (Penguin Books 2007) and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" (HarperCollins 2007) have made people "more aware of buying local, and of supporting local growers and farmers," said Webber.

The small family-owned farms that make up more than 80 percent of Massachusetts agriculture depend heavily on direct sales to consumers, through farm-stands, farmers markets, and Communi ty Supported Agriculture programs, he said.

Farmers markets are a major source of income for growers like Fran Busa, of Lexington, who sells at six local markets, including Bedford.

"This year is going to be a profitable year for all the farmers involved," said Busa, who was taking shelter from a spring shower in his recently renovated Battle Road Farm Stand on Lexington Road in Concord.

Busa, who reckons he sold around 1,000 heads of lettuce and 1,500 pounds of tomatoes per week last season, with hundreds of bunches of dandelion greens, mustard greens, and escarole, believes people will pay a premium for locally grown, fresh produce.

In an area with a short growing and selling season, farmers have to predict demand accurately and then keep up with it. "You need everything all at the same time for 25 weeks," Busa said, but "you don't want to over pick."

Winchester opened its first market this year, on June 14. "People are really clamoring for locally grown food," said Carolyn Starrett, founder of Sustainable Winchester, a group that promotes recycling and energy efficiency, and coordinated the market launch.

On a recent Tuesday morning, Starrett, with building contractor Fred Yen, who has led the Winchester market initiative, visited Pauline and Tim Henderson at the farm they manage in Wayland.

Starrett, a vegetarian, declined to taste the main product the Hendersons will bring to market: grass-fed beef from a herd of around 60 Devon cattle. But she was enthusiastic about their freshly picked mesclun salad, and their homemade greenhouse stacked with trays of basil and 2-inch high pepper and watermelon seedlings.

Outside stood a white painted beehive. "You get unbelievable crops when you have the bees," said Tim Henderson, who hopes eventually to have six hives.

A couple of weeks before market season opened, at the Chip-in Farm in Bedford, Neill Couvée and his brother Paul were figuring out how many eggs to bring to the Bedford market, the first they have agreed to supply. With daily egg production of around 2,500, from 3,000 laying hens, the brothers should keep Bedford in omelets and soufflés all summer long.

Oakes Plimpton has been running markets in the area since 1986. He founded and co-manages the Arlington Farmers' Market, started in 1997. In the early stages of planning the Winchester market, said Yen, "Everybody said, 'Talk to Oakes!' "

Sitting in the garden of his house perched above Robbins Park in Arlington Heights, Plimpton said he has been "totally impressed" by the organizing abilities of Yen and Grieb, and other newcomers to the scene, like Sonia DeMarta, who founded Lexington's flourishing market in 2005.

"We had no committees, nothing," he said with a laugh, recalling the early days in Arlington.

An enthusiastic amateur historian who has self-published three local history books, Plimpton explained how weekly farmers markets on the European model, standard in Colonial American towns, declined after it became more profitable for farmers to sell wholesale or to local food stores. As late as the 1920s, the Boston area was a net exporter of food to other parts of the country.

"Then they drained the swamps and planted Florida," and the local market was undercut by the growth of supermarkets in the 1950s and the flood of imported produce from California and Florida, said Plimpton. The market in Cambridge's Central Square, opened in 1978, was at the forefront of a farmers market revival promoted by the US Department of Food and Agriculture in the late 1970s.

On a brilliantly sunny opening day at the Arlington market on June 11, the Vermilya family string trio (Diana, 15, Kim, 13, and Eric, 10) played Celtic folk music among the stalls selling organic goat cheese and fresh herbs.

"Everything looks so good, we generally end up buying too much," said Dan Duryer of Arlington, who lives within walking distance.

"What I mainly come here for is the lady with the fish," said Christine Stone, who plans to reschedule her regular commute between central Massachusetts and Medford to fit in with market day.

Elizabeth Kozachek, 6, and her sister Mary, 4, sampled Nancy White's Arlington Cookies - Scandinavian-style pepper cookies cut in the shape of the Arlington map.

"We enjoy many of the local markets," said their father, Tom Kozachek, of Medford, hefting a cardboard box full of strawberries and asparagus. "Aside from the feel-good aspect of shopping locally, the prices are competitive and the produce is always fresh and good - we can taste the difference," he said.