Best Practices

Producer only farmers’ markets

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What is a Producer-Only Farmers’ Market? It’s a farmers’ market where all members may only offer for sale what they produce themselves. They are not allowed to buy-in items for resale. These markets have adopted stricter standards than the State of Maine minimum of each member being able to sell up to 25% bought-in products. […]

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What items are eligible to be sold at market?

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Several questions commonly arise about the ingredients used to produce a product sold at market: Can the ingredients be purchased? Do they need to be made by the producers themselves? Must they be Maine produced? Can they come from out-of-state or commercial sources? The Orono Farmers’ Market has a draft version of what items are […]

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The no-show rule

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When someone joins a farmers’ market, we normally would expect them to show up at least for several market days. Unfortunately, not everyone does. There could be a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes their expectations are higher than reality, and they find that they aren’t going home with the pocketfuls of money they had […]

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Good market practices

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The difference between struggling and success can be good market practices. What makes for a good farmers’ market? Certainly a strong and supportive base of shoppers is an essential ingredient. Yet demand for products is simply the fuel. How well the market is organized is the engine. Some engines waste fuel whereas others are efficient […]

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Do farmers’ markets need managers?

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Starting a farmers’ market is a form of community organizing. It happens on two levels, organizing the market members and organizing the shoppers. Working with these two audiences takes very different forms, and I will concentrate here primarily on how the market members are organized. Community organizing can take many forms depending on where the […]

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