the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views in an opinions expressed are those of the participants in do not reflect those of e m c or the town of ballmer b m c welcomes your comments call us the farmer's market opens for yet another season this week and we are going to be speaking today with house shubin who is the chair of the committee of the belmont food collaborative that administers the and runs the farmer's market thanks for stopping over how thanks for having me before we get started can i can you give us a  small lowdown on what the farmer's market is and what its relationship with the food collaborative is it's not a standalone organization right right so the farmer's market was started in two thousand and six and in about two thousand and ten a group of us decided that we needed to have a nonprofit so we formed the parent organization organization after the child kind of backwards but that was the beginning of the belmont food clever so it's a five a once the three nonprofit organization meaning that contributions to it are tax deductible right and the work is food related education wellness farmer's market in early june and oh and it will run for how many weeks the market opens tomorrow june th and it runs through october st but there will not be a market on independence day which is a thursday  and when when it's open it's open on thursday afternoon from when to when so we open it to and it's in the back of the parking lot behind the stores in belmont center  cross and channing street and we run till six hundred and thirty after labor day we closed six because it starts to get dark and chilly are you open your respective of weather or is it weather permitting i don't think we may have closed once but we open as long as we say we open we stay open as long as there aren't horrible storms last year there was a day when we thought we'd have to close and send everybody home because there was a lightning storm approaching but behind champions and so on and so forth and back it's in the public parking lot part of that parking lot by so somebody goes down there and it is evident where that the farmer's market is if it's bustling with activity i sure hope so anyway it's not evident because we're in the back of a parking lot there are tall arborvitae he blocking the view from the street so we have signs around to direct people from the center to the market but we have one thousand parking spaces some vendors take up too and the market manager takes up once we have about fifteen different vendors and mostly they have white tents so you can see that it is usually a good a good crowd there and we have lots of events so you're likely to hear music well let's let's talk about that for me is so what's at the market what what would people find well we have vendors in a lot of different categories i brought a list so i wouldn't ok we've got six farmers this year we have two bakers bringing sweets you know pastries and cookies or whatever alternating weeks and brats and we have a bre vendor who comes every week and when you say farmers that's produce yeah right so actually the meat vendors a farmer as well so yeah so we have a new meat vendor this year that we're very excited about we have a fish vendor who brings in day boat caught fish plus some smoked fish that's all it's all fresh and pretty local as locals fish can be we have sims prepared food vendors so you can get  get fresh pasta and in the beginning the season you know it's new england there's not that much growing in may and june so some of the farmers will bring greens because they're micro earlier things  go in the greenhouse plus flowers at the growing the greenhouse and plants that you can put your garden as well now and when i went to the farmers market in burlington vermont points they even had things like crafts and pottery but you don't have that here in about my fears is food religious food we get comments through the website once in a while from people want to come and do crafts and things but we just don't have the space for it  and it would take another person to cure rate that make sure we had the right folks to come in time so we decided to just focus on food one thing i heard you talk about i think i heard this in a way where as you talked about the meat vendor and the farmers do you have particular slots that you try to fell or and the fish vendor do you yeah do you go looking for a meat vendor and go looking for a fish vendor is that just the way it happens to be what we try to have a full range of food that you want to take home to make meals out of and snacks out of so i want to have meat fish dairy we have a new  cheese vendor this year one that's been with us for a while when have some prepared foods and breads and baked goods you know leaving some of that we have a meat vendor we've had wine in the past i find it to be probably good when people complain that we have too much of this and too much of that because it all balances out the way i look at it is if you think we have too many pastry vendors well we also have everybody else that's there and you know some people me included  like to make sure we have some good pastry choices of the market do you do you vendors come back every year or do you start a new every year we have total thirty two dollars vendors this year to them i think every week some come once a month every other week and you know that all ahead of time it's not just whoever whichever vendor because you can plan that way or you sorry to interrupt yeah let's let me finish that will come back to play because that's a major thing ok so we've got about twelve or fourteen new vendors about eighteen or twenty vendors that have been with us for a while i think some of been with us since about when we started in two thousand  obviously it's good to have vendors who stay with you it's like any business i mean we're really a business and if you've got ongoing relationships with customers and vendors it just makes things easier but things change some people think of farmers markets as a sort of an incubator for small local businesses so we might have a baker who is just starting out and then opens a store and can't do the farmer's market anymore or they don't change their business ideas and that happened what's with the gluten free bakery that was in belmont for a while they started at the farmer's market yeah and then they opened a store up on belmont street i think right i don't know exactly what happened after that but right and left him as a great thing it's really it's really a community thing in so many ways and and that's part of it helping people helping people get started so we spend the off season planning right so the market ended at the end of october i think we had our st planning meeting in the beginning of november we go to the winter farmer's markets and we see who's there that fills a need that we have either for a new kind of product or to replace somebody who's leaving of course that's fine you going to talk to them sometimes you get a sample or you just buy a bunch of stuff and you take it home and you know the goal is to have a good balance so that you can go there get meals and snacks and whatever you need for your house now you and i have talked before about how people use a farmer's market and i thought year your perspective was interesting  on how people can and i had this implies a judgment and i don't mean to imply it but that can and should use a farmer's market in how it's perhaps not most effective yeah so in a way it's the easy way to go and look and see what's available if you go to a supermarket you're going to find blueberries you're around you're going to find corn you're around but it comes from mexico or guatemala or california all of the vendors that we have except for the maple syrup vendor and one of the composting ones i think are from massachusetts so whatever you buy is in season which means you're not going to get corn and you know yeah going to gets you're not going to get winter squash in the beginning of the year so the best thing to do is kind of go with an open mind you can always get meat and dairy and fish cheese red but the produce changes it's new england right right now there's just not a whole lot growing outside so you go  you what is available is what's available what's an l so and the vendors are friendly right part of their business is helping shoppers understand what they have so i don't know if you've ever had  kind of kind of softball shaped and it has these leave stamps are these stems that come up from the bottom and i was to look like the sputnik satellite but i was at a market once where they had cut some up and put it out for sampling and it's pretty tasty it's crisp it's you know got some juiciness to it and it's kind of the you can put in a salad or sauter shred up and put in something and the farmers often have samples and they love to talk about what they have and how they can use it so what i hear is that people shared go to that the market see what's there in there and go with the attitude of saying this is what's available and i'll get what's available and take it home and use it rather than trying to go find a meal like united star market right if you have to have stuffed squash tonight then you have to go to a store market or whole foods or costco but if you want to have whatever's fresh then this farm is markets i think and really freshness is the key but because when corn is in season they probably picked that day or the day before and so it's as fresh as it can get you go to a supermarket often that the leaves on the outside of the corn look a little dry that's never going to happen in a farmer's market and because it's fresher the nutrition is likely to be higher and it doesn't go bad as quickly they raise the food for taste not for ship ability and so you getting a good deal let's look at the flip side of that as well so well other then the just the sales that a vendor gets to do vendors why do vendors come to a farmer's market it seems like there must be an easier way to make a dollar you could back that up a little bit and say why does anybody farm it's hard work i took my twenty six year old strawberry picking when he was little and i thought i just don't know how anybody does this and it was just one afternoon well they get to sell right to the consumer so there's not the market that a store would have and they like to talk to the shoppers and talk about what they do and you know people develop really good relations relationships with with the vendors in the vendors with the shoppers i guess you know it's in a way it's  what they do some of the really don't do retail in stores don't do wholesale they do farmer's markets and firm stance and is there a community of vendors and what i mean by that is is there a group of vendors that you would find whether you go to the belmont farmer's market or the lexington market or yes it is there as you as time has gone out of there being more and more farmers markets you can look at the list of who's at a market and find a lot of overlap and there seems to be more of that as time goes on i don't want to say that they're all the same because they're not one of the things that i think makes us special is what we have the sides the food vendors have told us and the shoppers as well because we do surveys there told us that there's a great sense of community at the belmont farmer's market so we have  one of our volunteers who spends a ton of time organizing events and somebody else who organizes the community table so we've got music we've got art we've got programs for kids we've got story time every week  local elected officials come and do office hours direct apartment comes and talks about programs when my kids were little i had no idea what was available for sports activities but we bring the wrecked apartment and they talked about that  recycling coordinator will be there tomorrow to talk about the new plastic bag ban so we try to make it be special make it be community and it seems to work because people tell us that they don't just come in buy something and leave they stay because it's a good environment so what i hear you saying is i have a friend who has been involved with the farmer's market for a good many years and she is probably spent that many years trying to convince me to come over to juggle some week and and that's consistent with having performances yes and i think we have a couple slots open in the events that we have a  magician who comes and entertains kids and adults he finished grad school graduate school last year i think he started when he was in middle school and you know you can't walk past a magician without stopping yes and you know we've got music little kids get up and dance people enjoy the music all kinds of genres really and you run it's people you know and you make new friends so it's a real community you know community thing let's look at that the contributes to the businesses in belmont center i mean the fact that they're here right behind our business our primary business district or do people go from the farmers market into the bookstore or into the toy store we  do a survey every fall and we asked people about that and they go to stores people tell us some people don't but most of the shoppers seem to go to a number of stores  to run their errands the things you do so we believe that we're bringing people into the elements center the merchants may not see that because you want to buy your meat and fish and peaches before you do all your other errands so yes you don't make a master damage t produce but and we have merchants from the center in other parts of town come to the market so last year we had cube a fine wines in the craft beer seller come on the same day the selectmen told us we could do sample so they did samples they talked about what they had and we like to promote businesses like that we have restaurants come in to do tastings new restaurants can now meet customers and and promote their businesses and we help shoppers learn about town something you just said strikes me as you talk about people buying their their produce or whatever they're going to buy and then going somewhere else the town of recently and plastic bags does that apply to you yes do you have is there a policy do people need to bring their own bags do you have bags so the ban is about w to understand how it applied to the farmer's market and she'll be there to talk to vendors and shoppers so we're hoping that people will come with their own bags and as it turns out we sell very nice farmer's market logo on them and you know there be some confusion beginning but the ban isn't new it's been at store market since winter and in town since early spring i believe and it's in other towns as well so the vendors should be familiar with it about an aspect of the business that perhaps is a bit more serious some people can't afford to go food shopping and my understanding is that the farmers market actually has a program that have so we do a lot of things and in food assistance the food what used to be food stamps is now called snap supplemental nutrition assistance program and it's run with  cards bank cards so we match snap transactions up to twenty dollars per shopper per week we also match wic and f m n p coupons wic is for women infants and children and the other is for seniors and so we match those dollar for dollar we do fund raising for that if people would like to donate help their neighbors bring home good healthy local food go to a farmers market dot org oh that provides an income stream so you can match the public assistance programs there's another food assistance program that we're not really involved with but the state runs called hip healthy incentives program that provides between forty dollars and eighty dollars per family per month depending on household size and it's free produce but directly from a farmer basically that came up in two thousand and seventeen sort of took us by surprise and we spent our entire twenty one week food matching budget in about a month because people just really came in for that we did some fundraising quickly in the summer to make up the shortfall we do an annual appeal in the winter and the community supports us it's really t agencies or town departments like you would be working with the council on aging you would be working with the health department if that does that occur do you work with the schools you hear about a dozen questions yeah  there but yes to all of them ok so we've got a great relationship with the department of health they've got rules about how food should be stored and sold and my philosophy is good i want to be safe and tell me what the rules are will help you and for some that come into inspections we do work with the schools in fact we were discussing in a meeting on monday a committee meeting about giving good certificates to the schools to hand out to families in need as a way to help them bring good food to their families we do work with accounts on aging a couple people from the food collaborative go down there and do a program and show people you know different ways to use some of the produce that we have at the market we try to be as involved in the community to achieve all of our goals as we can given the number of people that we have in the amount of time  i know that there is this is tangentially related but i know there is a relationship between the belmont food pantry and a groups called the boston area cleaners yeah  is there a relationship at the farmer's market just good that's another part of our food assistance program this food for free which is sort of a food rescue program they collect produce at the end of the day i mean the cleaners separately there's ok so the food for free comes to the market and collects things at the vendors want to donate i have a day they don't take that to the food pantry because the food pantries not open on thursday afternoons they can't share food they take it elsewhere and we give them some money and they take other people's food to the pantry we also support the boston area gleaners and you know cleaning is goes back to biblical times the farmers don't pick everything they possibly can in their fields and the cleaners go and get things that either the farmers say take this it's a donation or just things around the edges that they don't it's not productive for them to get and they just repeated to raise place we also have to basket at the managers tend to the market for people to leave donations for the food pantry now when i talk about the farmers market the farmers market this is self evident but isn't unique to belmont that i can go to lexington or arlington or there's one in harvard square there at the farmer's markets exist in multiple taps you do you folks work together is there a community of farmers markets in association farmer's markets that's another another community aspect so there's the mass farmer's market agency which is in waltham they provide various kinds of support to markets there is a master partner of agricultural resources that provides us with information but we have our and their various conferences that we go to but we have our own community as well so i've become friendly with the woman that runs the lexington market the man that runs the hingham market we have lunch once in a while and talk about things but the one from the lexington market and i started a facebook group for farmers market managers where we can say i have this problem with you know insurance or whether or finding vendors or volunteers what have you done and as with anything else it's just great to talk to people who've been through the same thing and we get together when we're at a conference and meet each other in person which is kind of fun and we do some farm visits where we got visit the produce pharmacist here we're going to do some farmer's market field trips to the committee members and go visit other markets and see exactly what they do when they're doing it now you've used the word community and how the farmer's market is intended to contribute to a sense of community so what i hear from that is the farmer's market isn't just about the food the farmers well it extends beyond being a provider a vendor a food so you know it was started in two thousand and six there was a group of people that was called walk belmont or something like that sure a d tom ford was in that and paulson who was our state senator number of other people i was involved in and the goal was to find some way to get people to have a place to walk to and bicycle to just another community thing and this grew out of that in hell he went of being the person who ran it for the st couple of years so that's always been a key part we want to fit into the community we want to bring the community and we want to make it a fun place to be so that you don't just run in and buy your stuff and leave you hang around and the parent organizations billman food org ok we are out of time thanks for stopping over we have been speaking with house you've been who is the chair of the farmer's market committee of the food collaborative the farmer's market opens this week and it will run this week being the st week of june it will run on thursday afternoons from two to six hundred and thirty and two to six after labor day and we're open until october st halloween thanks for stopping over i want to thank how again i want to thank you the listeners for tuning in you've been listening to community conversations i'm your host roger coulton you can access community conversations online through the media center website media dot org you can also access community conversations through i spy searching for the b m c podcast network thank you again for listening i'll talk to you again next time