Market Manager Relationships & Financial Incentives in D.C. Farmers’ Market Spaces
Interviewer(s): Interviewer
Interviewee(s): Respondent

Interviewer: Okay. So I’m curious because I didn’t hear specifically from Esther what your role kind of in markets and with the farm is, so I guess we can start with that.

Respondent: Oh okay, that’s fine. I am the farm manager, so to speak.

Interviewer: Okay, cool.

Respondent: I say that in quotations because we have another person who works at the farm whose been their 6, almost 7 years, and he’s been my partner in working. So I have the title of manager and I certainly do more of the people managing than he does but he’s, you know, just as effective and important to the operation. So you know. But I have the title of farm a manager, just to put something out there to the public that somebody is in charge, to contact or whatever. And that means that I, specifically, that I do a lot of the hiring, interviewing people, but I also – I work at the farm, I harvest vegetables, I weed. Everything that all of the other workers do, I do. I just have the added responsibility of being the contact for the person.

Interviewer: So some of the administrative work it sounds like is with you too?

Respondent: Yea, and also Esther and I share a lot of the administrative. So she does, thank goodness, we have a CSA. So she does all of the…

Interviewer: Putting the boxes together?

Respondent: No, no, that’s kind of my part of it. Growing the vegetables and making sure that things are selected and given to the customers. But she signs people up, she takes all the money, she lets me know whose going to be picking up that week and all I have to do is show up and say, okay, “there’s your food.” You know. So.

Interviewer: That’s a big job.

Respondent: It’s a huge job that she does on her end, so I’m grateful that I don’t have to worry about it. So it’s a coordinated effort.

Interviewer: Awesome.

Respondent: And I have to go to all of the markets because of my role, so I um. Uh, we rotate the rest of the staff on the market piece and so they stay at the farm sometimes and sometimes they come to the market with me. So that’s kind of how that works.

Interviewer: Okay, great, yea so I guess what I’m exploring will be more about that part. That piece, what happens when you’re physically there. It sounds like – I wrote down some notes – the markets you’re at are at Adam’s Morgan, NIST, and Ward 8 market? Is there another one?

Respondent: Yea so I’m not actually at the NIST market, that’s mostly what Mike does. And actually, we had a market in Adam’s Morgan and we have a Saturday market in Adam’s Morgan that we still and Tues – that’s on Saturday’s – on Tuesday’s we have the NIST market but unfortunately the Bethesda market we were doing at NIH, we stopped doing that one and started doing one at USDA. But that one didn’t really come together. So we stopped doing that, so then I started doing NIST with Mike at the end of last season. But the intention is that beginning of next season that we have somewhere else to go.

Interviewer: And how long have you been kind of in this role?

Respondent: I started working with Mike and Esther in 2006.

Interviewer: Wow, awesome, I’m getting lots of experience then that’s great!

Respondent: Yea, I didn’t have any before that so it’s really…it’s been on the job training and seriously on that [laughs]

Interviewer: Absolutely. So then I guess do you – does your, the markets you participate in they all accept Produce Plus right, the voucher? Do any of them match as well, like participate in a matching program?

Respondent: We don’t have a match with our markets, we’re not a managed market, which I’m sure Esther and Mike explained to you. So if we were to do a match it would just be coming out of our own funds. It wouldn’t be like, you know. So we don’t do a match but we have, in the past done some incentives to help people participate in our programs.

Interviewer: Yea, what has that looked like?

Respondent: Yea, at one point we were definitely, just for – I think it was Produce Plus, it might have been another one – there are so many of these programs that have kind of come through our market. There was one, one year, we just did that for the seniors because the seniors…that’s the struggle we have, trying to get seniors to participate. Sometimes transportation is an issue, you know carrying the groceries is an issue. So we were trying to do things to help them participate more. So we did a double match for them. But yea in general the Produce Plus, at the beginning of last year was really hard for us because people would come and pick up the coupons and they would just leave. They wouldn’t even stay for the market.

Interviewer: Oh, okay, interesting.

Respondent: Yea it was almost a, you could see that it was almost a – it had become kind of a game for some of the participants that had a lot of time on their hands, and didn’t have maybe a job or other things to go to. So they would just do the circuit and go to all the different markets they could and pick up the coupons; in the middle of the season or whatever they caught on to this and the lines grew really long because of this too. And so they started limiting the coupons people could pick up within a certain time frame.

Interviewer: And after that did you see you see people start to..

Respondent: Yes! It was much better then, the lines disappeared. We didn’t have that huge, you know influx, but people would come, they’d get their coupons and then they’d look at what thy and and use it. So that was good.

Interviewer: Good. And what did those interactions when people did come to use their coupons typically look like? Did you have conversations with those customers, did um…yea was it more in and out you know?

Respondent: Yea it was fun in a way. A lot of the people who were using the coupons were kind of new to – this particular program, I don’t know why, it kind of brought us some people who don’t usually go to farmer’s markets. Maybe they just used SNAP or something like that and they just go to the stores, not really to the farmer’s markets. And it looked like a little bit of a culture shock for them because they can find better deals at a grocery store usually. And so sometimes they would see our produce and say, “well I can get that cheaper at Safeway,” you know. So there was a lot of conversation along that. They would say, “well why should I get this,” you know, um and I would have these really interesting conversations with them about, “well you can you know go to the Safeway or the grocery store, but the purpose of growing our vegetables the way we do is that we’re trying to get something fresher, something that you might not see in the grocery store. Because it’s just something that doesn’t travel well or isn’t able to be mass marketed and so it’s something that you just might see here. So I’ll show them patty-pan squash, or some exotic winter squash that they’ve never seen before. But also sometimes they would, they thought we were trying to pull the wool over their eyes. It was pretty funny sometimes, like “yea sure, you’re just trying to charge me more for something I can for cheap.” So anyways, that is still an issue. Its still a struggle, that we can’t always provide things at a discount like you get at the stores, because we’re driving it into the city.

Interviewer: Yea and you have your costs too, so this is the real cost of food.

Respondent: Yea the real cost of food is different, different than…

Interviewer: The wholesale price you might see in the grocery store. Yea I hear you. And in those kind of interactions with the customers you had, in the moments where you really did get to connect with them, do you have like a specific memory or a memorable person or of an individual who has really stuck with you from implanting the program? It can be in this year or a year past.

Respondent: I… I don’t have too many. I’m not always at the register because I do the CSA program.

Interviewer: Sure

Respondent: So I know that the girls that were at the register – not just girls – there were guys, mostly we have women on our staff.

Interviewer: Good! We need of that.

Respondent: I don’t understand why it is that way. Its funny, when I first started the farm in 2006 it was almost exclusively guys that had applied for our jobs. I don’t know if its because Esther put this information on the – I had some experiences early on where guys didn’t want to, you know listen to me as the boss. They would always go to Mike and be like, “well, he’s the owner.” Yea it was so funny. And I told her about this stuff, and she was like “oh my goodness” and she put something up on the website that I haven’t been able to get her to take down, which was kind of a rant “if you cant accept this strong woman as your…” [laughs]. Its really funny and um I don’t know if that is the reason that it has suddenly kind of turned the tide, or because at the beginning we didn’t really have pictures of the staff so maybe now people are saying, oh, “there’s a black woman running this.” You know so maybe that’s it. So I don’t know.

Interviewer: Good good, well that’s an incredible thing, I’m happy to hear you have that.

Respondent: So back to the questions

Interviewer: An individual experience if you have one? If you cant think of one that’s okay.

Respondent: Let me think about it while we talk, but I cant think of it off of the top.

Interviewer: Okay, and we can come back to it at the end too. And what about that person that does work in that register role, on their end what have you see with them accepting these um vouchers? Are there are any farm-related challenges or successes that you have around accepting the program?

Respondent: This year, we had a market that we started in Anacostia that was – almost exclusively – a Produce Plus market. In fact we had, I forgot what the – what the um – the average is, but they maybe got like 20 or 40 dollars worth of cash from customers and then almost everything else that they brought in – up to 1,000 bucks – was Produce Plus. Which, for a new market that we just started doing this year, to get a $1,000 is pretty good. Um and that’s not including the cost of food that’s kind of just the cash in. So that’s pretty decent for a farmer’s market, a new one, and uh, um… apparently we were the, and I never meant to this market because it was new. What we started to do was just sending our staff two at a time so that ehy would have some support for one another and to help one another, and I stay at our main market. So every Saturday two of our staff would just go and do this market, which was kind of a sacrifice in a way, because it made us short staffed at the main market but we really felt strongly that this un-served market, kind of food desert area, didn’t have anything. We should go, that’s within our mission, we should do this. So we did it and um all the people that worked in that – it was 4 different people that worked that market – and all of them called it their favorite market. Because they said the customers were feisty and they were funny and they asked a lot of questions about the food, “like what’s this and how do I cook it and what do I do with it?” And uh, and they always said, “please come back.” And they would say, “we’ll bring our coupons next week, just don’t leave us.” And you know that was that kind of experience and so they felt, the staff felt very appreciated you know and that they were actually doing something to help people learn about food and what not. And because they grew the food it was fun for them, “well this is what I did with it at the farm,” and that kind of thing. So um. Maybe this is the story you were looking for.

Interviewer: Yea, this is. This is exactly it.

Respondent: Yea, I forgot about that. Because it wasn’t my experience you know but it was, you know, it was through my staff.

Interviewer: And yea it is your experience, you got to hear that from people and that’s your role and I think that’s why specifically I’m interested in talking to market managers because they’re such a critical bridge between, you know, the staff running that register and the customers who want to know about the food and the organizations too. So yea, when I initially reached out to your farm I had found you through the USDA’s farmer’s market directory and so I thought you managed a farmer’s market and that you were the whole organization running the market, and when I got the clarifying email saying, well we don’t manage all of our markets – some of them we are just vendors at, I thought, “this is still and extremely important perspective and so I really appreciate that you have that experience to share with me.

Respondent: Oh yea, sure, it was – four people, all of them were like, “hands down” that was hteir favorite market out of them. They went to the Bethesda market at NIH, they’d been to the Adam’s Morgan market – some of them – they had, let’s see, the NIST market – they had gone to that one – and then we have one in Brookland which is our other, I guess the Anacostia market and the Brookland market were the two markets where we gathered the most of the produce plus coupons. Are you looking at, or researching about SNAP and …?

Interviewer: EBT?

Respondent: EBT and the other…?

Interviewer: WIC?

Respondent: Yea, WIC

Interviewer: Um. Not specifically unless it’s in connection to like a matching program, but it’s definitely related. It’s often the same people that come to use SNAP and Produce Plus.

Respondent: I don’t know, the EBT is just… we find that most people must use their SNAP stuff or their EBT stuff at the grocery store.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: I think they, you know, they have the choice to go either way and I think that they don’t choose the farmer’s markets for that kind of…they want to go to the store and get whatever they can get there. And theyre limited at… maybe not the SNAP people.. but the WIC people specifically have to get certain things.

Interviewer: They cant get eggs or milk, or yea

Respondent: Right, you have to only get vegetables. EBT, I meant he SNAP people probably have the same restriction.

Interviewer: Maybe, but I think they both qualify for the Produce Plus right? So sometimes I think there might be overlap but I’m not sure either. Um. Have you, yea I guess those market workers that - those four you were speaking to – their experiences where less of the Produce Plus vouchers used, or even better your own experience having that conversation with a customer um that yea is paying with cash versus paying with a voucher did you notice anything about those interactions that sticks out to you? Did there seem to be differences?

Respondent: Well they, in our training they always say that, you know, you don’t want to treat anybody differently.

Interviewer: Sure; but I think that customers often approach a market stand or farmers differently so its not just your approach, its also “what does a customer that’s paying with cash bring to that interaction?” Not just, what are you. Um, so, I don’t know – is one more interested in you grabbing their groceries or do you usually have more talks as a farmer around food with one?

Respondent: Yea

Interviewer: Are there ways that those interactions look different and feel different or, yea, have different conversations.

Respondent: You know its funny. The… it’s, it’s more a difference between interacting with people who have had an interest in buying at a farmer’s market and have done it in the past and just really feel comfortable. That’s more the difference I see. Because sometimes the produce plus people, some of them had been customers of ours before they used the program. Yea, and I did find that there were some of them that really did, theres a certainly level of, for those people theyre uncomfortable with it because their financial circumstances have changed – theyre eligible or something is happening – and they feel a little bit uncomfortable suddenly utilizing the program as if we’re going to look at the differently. But the people that have already been used to a farmer’s market and are more comfortable with it, theyre more comfortable with how it works, less suspicious of what we’re doing.

Interviewer: Do they seem less suspicious or the pricing or the choices or, what tells you that about the interaction?

Respondent: they just don’t question the pricing as much they just kinda go, okay, well I’ll do the best I can to make my produce plus work you know. But that’s also not also being a doubling market where they kinda do that doubling, a managed market, we frequently have to turn away people. They come up to me and say, “ oh I thought this was a doubling market,” and some of them will actually want to return their goods. You know like if they, if they realize that theyre not gonna get the doubling. So that’s um, it’s unfortunate but um.. in some cases that’s why I think we had the people who would just come to our market and pick it up but not shop there. They would go somewhere else because we couldn’t match it. So I don’t know, I still think participating in programs is still beneficial. Even if they don’t always buy with us, just because it still gives them the opportunity if they come by and are like, “oh wow, look at your watermellons,” it’s something. You know so Im sure we had some cross over sales, even if they weren’t interested in showing all of those bucks at our market.

Interviewer: And for those customers who did seem a little uncomfortable or did have a little bit of suspicion around the market, how, yea what was your kind of best practice for introducing them to all of this?

Respondent: Well, I have to say that Esther – have you had a chance to interview her yet? I know she’s been visiting with her step-mother and her step-sister who had some family illness or problems so shes been really busy.

Interviewer: No worries, I’ll reach out again next week and see if she’s available then. I’d love to sit down and talk to her.

Respondent: Yea. Yea I think, I think, cause she’s the person who processes all of our stuff so she’ll have that perspective. She’ll always, also, shes always at the register. So she has a lot of interactions. Mine are secondhand mostly.

Interviewer: That’s okay

Respondent: But she…she’s very, very – Mike’s had the market for over 40 years – and so she’s very very invested, very proud. And so when people question it, her back gets up. So um, sometimes you know I find myself you know running over to her being like, “need a coffee,” “do you want me to take the register for a little while, you can walk away for a minute,” cause she gets defensive if they question the prices or question. She says we, “we really try hard,” and I say, “ I know, I know but it’s not personal, they’re just trying to – you know – utilize their, their, benefit to the best of their ability and you know, so.” So yea there’s that ad I think that maybe some kind of education around the differences between farmer’s markets and grocery stores and how you really come across… I don’t know, I don’t even know if they read the information that comes with their, or like if there’s an orientation for the people that get it, um. So. I don’t know if that, from the perspective of the people who give the produce plus coupons out if they could do that kind of education or if we on our end just need to do it. But there’s definitely, sometimes they just don’t quite understand. And I guess because there’s so much different between all of the markets, the pricing and the situation of how the actual incentive works.

Interviewer: Yea, absolutely.

Respondent: but all in all I’d say that without that program for our Anacostia market, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. It just, there weren’t, none of them – almost all of the customers walked up there and they kind of looked like it as free money. They’d say oh, this is free money, I’m gonna buy peaches that I wouldn’t never have bought normally. I’m gonna get this wonderful thing that I don’t usually have access to. So, um, without the coupons the number of people just drops off dramatically and they might come by the market and they might stop and say, “I don’t have any coupons but this is all beautiful.” So anyways it’s a huge difference.

Interviewer: Okay. Um, okay well I think we’ve run through a lot of this – you were so quick and so wonderful! Thank you, I didn’t even have to look down at this [looks down at the sheet] you addressed so much. You did almost all of this.

Respondent: Okay

Interviewer: Yea, just give me one second to double check this real quick but I think we hit a lot of really great stuff and I’m really really happy that we got to sit down today and talk about this. [pause] I don’t know, I guess the only other thing that I would ask – for the market manager who are running the full market, for the person that’s responsible for setting up the Anacostia market, or NIST, or Bethesda, um, how do interacts between managers look like? Are they business relationships, are they casual relationships, what is the experience there?

Respondent: You mean.. well at our market, well you know we have our farm and the people who go to manage the market live together, so its not a business relationship, we live together and I’ll make a schedule and I’ll say, okay, and these are the people that are going to market with me on Saturday and these are the people who ae going next week.

Interviewer: That is my dream.

Respondent: [laughs]

Interviewer: I’m not kidding. But I think I mean more like, so you participate in the Ward 8 farmer’s market right?

Respondent: Yea but that one I haven’t been to though because it was a brand new thing that they offered us last year. Normally we don’t have a competing market but this was competing at the same time as another market is well-established and so I couldn’t split myself in two so I had to just make a decision and say, we can either hire some local people to do this but I don’t know that that would be necessary or it would be not authentic enough. I think in the end it was better that we had people that have grown a lot of the vegetables selling them to people because there were all of those questions. If we had just hired a local person to sell them then they would have been like, “I don’t know,” so I think that worked out. But I do have, when we set up a market we’re all setting them up together usually.

Interviewer: Are you generally the only producer at the market or are there other stands around?

Respondent: There are other stands around but usually Esther and Mike have tried to set it up so that wherever we go there’s not a huge amount of competition on the vegetable side. There is one other vegetable producer at our Adam’s Morgan market – one other farm – and it used to be three farms and the one guy retired and we just didn’t replace him so it’s just our two farms and then the other vendor is a flower vendor who also has some other like flowers and plants and uh, sometimes he brings some pre-packaged nuts and other things and then we have a bread vendor. Bread and cookies and stuff and that is it for Adam’s Morgan and then we have a similar thing at the other markets, where we have people doing different things.

Interviewer: And do you personally help in organizing the different farmers that are there or that is an external person?

Respondent: Yea, well either, the market we have at Adam’s Morgan it’s kind of a contract between us and the owner of the property. So he will contract that Mike be kind of the lead person, like he was 30 years ago or 40 years ago, so that anyone who wants to come to market has to go through him and be approved and then they have to sign a contract with the bank. That’s the way that one has worked. And that’s kind of how it is, it’s managed but its managed by mike and he doesn’t walk around setting rules saying, “okay, we have to start at this time! Serve at this time!” You know. We don’t do any of that.

Interviewer: So its much more casual it sounds?

Respondent: Much more casual, that one. At the NIST market it’s a corporate campus and they just kind of invited mike on their campus to their courtyard near the cafeteria so mike just sets up and he’s been there for years and so people know them and then he asked the bread person whose at our Adam’s Morgan market, “hey, you’d be a great compliment and I think you’d bring out more customers to my market so do you wanna,” so he invited him. So I think theyre the only two at that market location but it’s a corporate campus and you have to go through security so it’s not like an open thing, not just anybody can just go in. It’s just the boys and the food.

Interviewer: Yea, so how does that relationship look different?

Respondent: What do you mean?

Interviewer: Well it sounds like this has a very different feel than the market at Adam’s Morgan where Mike is running the market but very casually?

Respondent: Right, so he still does the same thing – he just goes in and does his thing and the only difference is that there are some chefs there at the cafeteria, you know Brenner the corporate cafeteria there, so he has a relationship with that chef because he comes to sponsor him. So the guy runs these cafeterias all over the corporate campus and whatever so he’s not interested in micro-managing, as long as he doesn’t do anything hanous than he’s like, “okay, youre here, people love you, we’ll see you next week.” You know he doesn’t even stop in every week to see what we’re doing, Mike usually checks in with him ands says, “hey, do you need anything for your kitchen,” yes, no, whatever, so that’s um that’s, yea its very interesting. And that’s been my wonderful experience so far. We did participate in the Columbia Heights managed market and – I did this, I stayed back at Adam’s Morgan because that was our bread-winner and we didn’t want anything to happen to it – so they went to Columbia Heights for a year… and um, and the second year that they, the Columbia heights was small to begin with but then it just blown up. Have you talked to people from that market?

Interviewer: No, not yet,

Respondent: So mike and Esther were like, well now there’s three vegetable vendors and our sales have gone down and there’s you know, there’s no advantage for us to be here anymore. And um, so um, so they stepped away from it. In general, my experience has been that once you get to a managed market situation its very hard, its very competitive, the people that manage the market, they don’t really – they look at it from the standpoint of, “I want as many competing people in here as possible, I want it to be big and robust and have lots of choices for people.” What they don’t understand is that, what they don’t kind of focus on is that when youre individual stores, and when you bring more and more people in, your individual vendors make less and less money.

Interviewer: Yea and what is the way you see the financial incentive around that. There are the same number of people using Produce Plus whether or not there’s two vegetable stands or three, um, so I don’t know if that’s something you’ve seen a financial impact on as a farm?

Respondent: Well, for us because we – the Brookland market is the same, we have a contract with metro system since we’re on their property underneath a bridge. And we’ve just brought them in, new farmers, we’ve brought them in with us. The bread person is in with us.

Interviewer: I guess I should sit down with the bread person!

Respondent: Yea, he’s wonderful. I guess there’s also now a free-range meat, some kind of a meat, and um I forgot who else. But we’re the only ones that accept incentives. Which for some vendors is horrible. Um. And uh, so the metro has –again the contract that happened the same way with Suntrust bank as with Adams Morgan – I guess we’ve had kind of an unusual experience. I guess maybe because Mike and Esther have been around for so long, Mike and Esther were one of the first farmer’s markets in the area really. And so. I almost don’t really, I don’t know what its like for the other people who have to compete the way… that one year was our only experience at Columbia Heights and it was kind of negative, but in the sense of it was great in the beginning because it was new and we were one of one or two vendors – you know, who were vegetable – and we had good sales and new people coming in and it was great. And the next year they came back and they tripled or quadrupled the number of vendors and then everybody’s sales went down and so, you know, so.

Interviewer: Yea.

Respondent: So yes, for us as farmer’s too there’s an impact.

Interviewer: Okay, is there anything you think is important for you to know about interactions around the produce plus program?

Respondent: I think probably because you’re going to be talking to Esther, probably, and I would encourage you to because she has a whole different experience.

Interviewer: I’m definitely going to try!

Respondent: I think because of that you’ll get another full side you know.

Interviewer: Okay, great. So I, just thank you for your time. I have a really quick questionnaire if you could fill that out for me.