| AUGUST 10, 2011 -- There's something you can't buy at the giant chain groceries that's abundantly free at farmers markets: Call it a festival atmosphere.
There's a vibe that induces conversation, laughter and plain old-fashioned neighborliness. Of course, there's fresh produce, but live music, handicrafts, displays by local nonprofits, and cooking demonstrations add up to fun. And ultimately there's something invigorating about buying a head of lettuce and a cucumber from the person whose soil-caked hands indicate they plucked them from the ground that morning.
Farmers cultivate crops. Farmers markets cultivate community.
With increasing interest in fresher, more healthful foods, it's no surprise that farmers markets are sprouting across the state faster than asparagus on a warm spring day. Connecticut now has well over 100 markets, from the gantlet of vendors along the sidewalk fronting New Haven City Hall to the circle of booths on New Hartford's bucolic Pine Meadow Green and the cluster of tents perched on a Sahara of asphalt in a Bristol shopping center parking lot. But however wildly successful, the future of farmers markets remains uncertain because of the continued disappearance of a limited and irreplaceable resource: farmland.
The first step in protecting farmland is ensuring local farming remains profitable through demand for fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs, fiber, dairy products and nursery plants. The markets "are godsends" former state agriculture commissioner Bruce Gresyczyk recently told me as he bagged tomatoes for a customer at a market beside a neatly trimmed and well -haded park in downtown Naugatuck. "They provide retail outlets where farmers get fair prices rather than being at the mercy of wholesalers."
Each day we make decisions about what to eat, and our choices have wide ramifications for the world in which we live. Whether we drink a glass of milk or enjoy a can of soda, for example, is not just an issue of competing flavors and nutritional value. The production and distribution of these products create distinct infrastructures and landscapes. It may be the difference between a corrugated metal bottling plant and a farm with pastured cows and cornfields.
This is not to say there's anything wrong with drinking cola in moderation. But we should be aware that eating isn't only about filling stomachs and enjoying flavors. With every food dollar we spend, we cast a vote. Eating is a political act. But while buying at farmers markets may help preserve local agriculture one pepper, one potato and one apple at a time, putting your money where your mouth is going to be at dinner may not be enough.
A popular bumper sticker admonishes: "No Farms, No Food." But the warning could be even more basic: "No Farmland, No Farms, No Food." And, of course, without farmland there would be no farmers' markets with all their community benefits.
Although possessed of some of the world's most fertile lands, over the last generation Connecticut has lost thousands of acres of farmland each year to subdivisions, shopping centers and other uses that command higher prices for property.
Fortunately, since 1979 Connecticut has had a program of purchasing farmland development rights whereby the land stays in private hands after the state buys an easement preventing it from being developed for other uses. Once the development value of the land has been sold, competition with housing or commercial uses is not a factor in any future sale, leaving the property more affordable for farmers. But fewer than 40,000 acres of a 130,000-acre goal have been protected. While local land trusts and the nonprofit Connecticut Farmland Trust have secured several thousand additional acres, more must be done to ensure a ready supply of farm fresh crops in the future.
With a constituency that clearly values local foods, farmers markets could be nurseries of support for farmland protection. Banners and literature highlighting the issue might be prominently displayed and websites could tie the market experience to the land base.
Farmers, market personnel, performers and others could be influential talking up the issue with patrons. No one need be cajoled, but everyone should be aware. If each person attending a farmers market wrote their state and municipal elected officials about the need to protect farmland, urged their land trust to purchase arable soils, or made donations for this purpose to the Connecticut Farmland Trust and other like-minded organizations, it might just be possible to meet the farmland preservation goal before we run out of fertile acres to protect.
At farmers markets we don't just buy ears of corn or heads of cauliflower; we invest in a way of life, our health and our landscape. But making a purchase is not enough. If we want a future in which farmers markets flourish, it will take concerted community action to save land using the very type of community spirit the markets so effectively foster.
David K. Leff is a member of the Place Board of Contributors and the author of two books of poetry and two nonfiction volumes. His work can be viewed at http://www.davidkleff.com.
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