by Steve Russell

I’ll admit, it took a while to get used to some of our fine Central Virginia farmers’ markets, where it seems that for every booth heaped with ripe, beautiful fruits and vegetables, there is another vendor selling less identifiably “farmy” items such as soap and jewelry. Even as I made a ritual out of eating a delicious country-ham biscuit from Cricket’s Baked Goods as I strolled the Charlottesville City Market on early Saturday mornings, I clung to my prejudice that these weren’t the “real” farmers’ markets of my youth, where crusty old truck farmers wearing crustier overalls haggled over the price of watermelons and purple hull peas without ever dismounting their tailgates—no tents, no logo-emblazoned signage, and for sure no balloon art for the kids.

     How did I come by my bias? Honestly enough, I think, from toiling at various farmers’ markets from the time I was 10 years old until I graduated from college. I’ve previously written in this magazine about the roadside farm stand my father constructed for my older brother, Mike, and me in West Tennessee. It was there that I first learned about the painstaking work of raising food (and commenced a hateful grudge against prickly okra stalks that didn’t relent until I planted a row in my garden plot just this summer). It was a handsome, sturdy stand—in fact, it still sits in the same overgrown spot today—but our enterprise didn’t outlast Mike getting a driver’s license and seeking a steadier paycheck off the farm.

     I also hold fond memories of Memphis’ Scott Street farmers’ market, a bustling agricultural bazaar in the middle of an otherwise urbanized zone where institutional produce buyers and the general public would search for bargains. When our sweet corn patch was especially prolific (and relatives had picked all their freezers could hold), we’d occasionally fill a truck bed in the evening and drive to Scott Street, arriving after dusk. This was full-on commodity capitalism at its purest, with a cadre of vendors roving between their posts and the overloaded farm trucks, which parked on the periphery just long enough for a transaction to be made, then rolled back empty toward the Mississippi Delta. Dad would survey the going rates, seek out a vendor who appreciated the freshness of our corn, and cash would trade hands. If there had been an ice cream truck, this would’ve been an excellent moment to ask for a treat, but Scott Street ran on deals, not frills.

    My favorite farmers’ market, though, was the informal one that operated on the south side of the square in my small hometown. For most of the summers I was in junior high, I’d spend a few weeks there selling corn, peas, and whatever else might be plentiful at the time. I couldn’t drive yet, so I’d load 50 or 60 dozen ears of ‘Silver Queen’ onto an ancient farm wagon that Dad hitched to a truck and pulled to the square in the mornings. There I’d remain, with a jug of lime Kool-Aid and a comic book, until I sold out. Only at first I didn’t sell out. I’d just sit, lost in the latest adventures of Spider-Man, as potential customers drove past and the corn hardened. Then Dad, stopping by to check on me at lunchtime, imparted a valuable lesson—that I needed to give folks a reason to stop. He filled a few bushel baskets with corn, tilted them toward passing traffic, then yanked down the shucks on a couple of big, pretty ears and stuck them at the corners of the wagon. I was fully impressed by this Agri-Marketing 101 lesson, and by that night I’d recruited Mom to help turn some cardboard scraps into colorful signs to hang off the wagon. From then on, I saw a dramatic increase in sales—and not just because Mom nudged her friends to buy from me. Often I’d be down to my last dozen by lunch, to the chagrin of the more established vendors who couldn’t be bothered to compete with a seventh-grader.

     So I guess I shouldn’t be at all surprised, and certainly not bothered, that three decades later, smart farmers’ markets in Central Virginia and elsewhere have taken advantage of the basic lessons of salesmanship that my father taught me. After all, that’s really what the fancy extras, from doughnuts to debit cards, are all about: grabbing more people’s attention, so that they continue to support all our wonderful local vendors—even the old-fashioned ones that still use cardboard signs to hawk sweet corn. Come to think of it, if I’d been smart enough to hand out balloon animals, I might have sold out long before lunch.

Steve Russell is the publisher of Edible Blue Ridge.