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Market Economy
Ohio`s beautiful crops are ripe for the picking, but are grocery stores beating farmers market prices?
The Plain Dealer
August 15, 2007
By Debbi Snook
The direct route from farm to table — no middleman — has always been the cheapest and most delicious food path to take.
Witness those humble, hand-painted roadside stands that run on the honor system.
When we leav e the right amount of money in the unmonitored metal box, it still feels like a steal. I’ve had more than one farmer tell me they opened the box to find extra money, not a shortage. Maybe it’s so cheap and so good we don’t care about the change.
Now more farmers are bringing their crops to town, setting up under crisp, white canopies at farmers markets. The quality and flavor are unbeatable, but the prices are not quite the same.
In fact, as The Plain Dealer Taste staff discovered in a shopping exercise, the total cost of five farmers market items was about 28 percent higher than the cost of similar items in a supermarket, even for some locally grown produce.
That means for every $1 we spent in a supermarket that week, it cost us $1.28 for similar items at the farmers market.
While prices can drop as individual crops reach their peak, we shopped like most people looking for a mix of items that were at or near peak.
We still had to ask: What gives? Is the romance of the deal over between us and the farmers?
The answer is yes and no, according to the managers of farmers markets and supermarket produce buyers we interviewed. They said the answer depends on the quality of watermelon we buy, the size of our wallet, the cleverness of our wits and the breadth of our worldview.
What is certain is that our appetite for farm-direct food is increasing.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farmers markets keeps growing, up from 1,755 in 1994 to 4,385 last year. Northeast Ohio’s seven-county area has more than 30 this year, with first-timers in Euclid, Hudson, Woodmere, Munroe Falls and the Cleveland neighborhoods of Kamm’s Corners and St. Clair-Superior.
Prices aside, they are clearly offering something supermarkets do not.
Local produce at the supermarket
At the same time, more supermarkets are making an effort to tap this market by buying locally during harvest and staying competitive with farmers markets.
Although officials of Giant Eagle, the 350-store chain headquartered in Pittsburgh, declined to be interviewed for this story, Heinen’s produce buyer Terry Romp talked about the reasons he has been able to offer some lower prices at his 17 stores.
He contracts with dozens of regional farmers and also buys at produce auctions to fill in gaps.
Both get him what he calls commodity or wholesale prices. Romp said the farmers who sell to him are not necessarily the same farmers at farmers markets.
“Nagel’s in Avon has a couple hundred acres of corn,” said Romp. “If they went to every farmers market every day, they still couldn’t sell it all. And most of the guys I go to aren’t big enough to supply Giant Eagle.”
Some farmers aren`t big enough for him.
“It would be tough for a fiveacre farmer who diversifies his crops to grow enough for Heinen’s,” he said.
Romp said he’s not discounting local produce as a “loss leader,” a practice of lowering prices drastically just to bring in customers.
“Local produce is such a big thing, it’s 50 percent of what we carry this time of year,” he said.
“We can’t afford not to make money on it.”
During local harvest peaks, Ohio-grown produce is 80 percent to 85 percent of the fruit and vegetable inventory at Miles Farmers Market, a commercial grocery store in Solon, said independent owner Frank Cangemi.
Cangemi boasts a system of pickups and deliveries with farms that don’t always include a bill. Many farmers trust him to pay them what the market will bear, he said.
Both Romp and Cangemi said they want all farmers to get the price they need.
“We want them to survive,” said Cangemi. “We need to make sure they keep planting.”
“There’s room for everybody,” said Romp. “Farmers markets are good for the little guy.”
But are they good for the consumer who might have to pay higher prices?
They can be, said Kari Moore, spokeswoman for the Countryside Farmers Markets in Akron and Peninsula.
Reasons for the higher prices
Moore said she wasn’t surprised at the results of our survey and welcomes the chance to tell people what they get at her markets beyond a pound of tomatoes.
A list on her home organization’s Web site, www.cvcountryside. org, says farmers market food is fresher, lasts longer, has more flavor and nutritional value, gives more of our food dollar to the farmer, burns less fuel to get to the consumer, preserves a variety of species and helps build communities.
“That is worth 28 percent more to me,” she said. “It depends on what the customer cares about. There’s no shortage of issues to think about.”
Donita Anderson, manager of the North Union farmers market system in Cleveland, Parma, Woodmere, Bath, Westlake and Lakewood, said smaller farms have to charge more because they operate on a smaller margin of profit.
“The small farmer has one little tractor,” she said. “Any rise in fuel costs hits him directly.”
She said her markets’ farmers have not raised their prices over the last four years except for blueberries, which had difficulties in crop size because of freezing and drought.
Not every customer can afford a higher price for produce. But many can afford it and should pay the price, writer Michael Pollan urged in a New York Times article this year.
While he called it shameful that not everyone can afford to eat well in America, he said, “Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation.”
Buying quality food helps preserve quality soils, he said. That contributes to our health and the health of those who live near those quality soils.
Finding a good price is just another bonus.
Plain Dealer food and restaurants editor Joe Crea and reporters Brenda Junkin and Greg Burnett contributed to this story. To read full article, click here. © The Plain Dealer
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