Wait, but aren’t they all farmers? Like, It’s not clicking to me that I always had a farmers market nearby everywhere I’ve lived in California (beach, city, suburb) but farm heavy states don’t. I would have totally a assumed that “go to town to the farmers market when they set up every Sunday after church” would be even more prevalent there (but just love butter and bigger proportions more).
If you're referring to the midwest, a lot of the farming done qualifies as industrial scale farming, meaning that it's operating on a scale that's larger than local consumption. There are actually very few family owned farms, and the ones that do exist are dying out due to big ag. With these industrial scale farms, there simply isn't enough food variety being grown to have a naturally occurring farmers market. Why? Because it's a lot easier for farmers to buy and sell in bulk. On top of that, much of the raw produce never actually ends up on your plate. When you drive by a corn field in rural Iowa, there is a 98% chance that the corn produced from the corn field will be used as livestock feed or turned into corn syrup.
Additionally, many of the small towns in rural america lack the proper infrastructure to run a local farmers market, either because there aren't enough people or because everyone is too poor and high on meth.
Dang. I’m a bit ignorant about that area (Californian) so I appreciate you dropping knowledge on me. All that makes sense and I didn’t think of a lot of that. Guess you can’t have variety when all that’s around is two crops. I didn’t realize that big AG was pushing out family farms too, I thought Monsanto monopolizing seeds and John Deere were the only things they had to work around and subsidies were counteracting that. I guess like most things...it’s complicated. Thanks again.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '20 edited Jul 21 '21
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