Abstract
The need for an updated framework for all types of farmers markets and the varied levels of capacity to share the impacts of their work led to the development of the Farmers Market Metrics (Metrics) program at the Farmers Market Coalition (FMC), a nonprofit working to strengthen farmers markets across the country. This essay provides a timeline of the steps and partnerships that led to the creation of this program, including the exploration of existing data collection systems suitable for grassroots markets, observations from markets engaged in evaluation, feedback by pilot users of the Metrics system, and best practices and recommendations uncovered during the development of Metrics. See the press release for this article. Note: A revised article was published on July 14, 2020. The revisions include clarifying the role of Dr. Morales and the timeline of the USDA AFRI grant (described on pp. 13–14) and authorship of the Morales & Padilla source (footnote 5 and references section, p. 25).
Highlights
Collecting data at farmers markets is not a new endeavor; reports on the impacts of farmers markets stretch back decades (Brown, 2002)
In 2013, in collaboration with Dr Alfonso Morales, professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin– Madison (UW), Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) began work on an successful grant application to the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI)3 that would fund two components of the Metrics research: refining the collection methodologies and prototyping summary reports that would result from the data collected
The participating markets were required to have operated for a full season, to name a specific contact person to participate in online and inperson meetings, to collect the data as instructed, and to collect the same four metrics:
Summary
Sponsored by Darlene Wolnik,a * Jennifer Cheek,b and Marian Weaver c Farmers Market Coalition.
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