BOISE, Idaho — The Boise Farmers Market has doubled in size since it began 11 years ago. Vendors have created a community of support for peers and local farms.
- "Here you can ask questions. You can learn a lot about your food."
- The Boise Farmers Market is looking for a permanent location in the Idaho Botanical Garden for expansion.
- The Boise Farmers Market
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story.)
It's spooky season at the Boise Farmers Market but what's not scary is meeting the people directly responsible for your food.
"Here you can ask questions. You can learn a lot about your food," says Janie Burns of Meadowlark Farm.
Eleven years in, the Boise Farmers Market has outgrown its original location at 10th and Grove, doubling the vendors, and tripling the sales.
Executive Director of the Boise Farmers Market Amber Beierle tells me, "...What that's meant, last year we had over $2.5 million in reported vendor sales. So that's the vendors coming to us and telling us what their sales are. So that's the impact."
As the valley expands, farmland contracts. Farmers markets provide a community and resources -- in particular for a farmer when mother nature intervened and caused a catastrophic loss.
"Nothing they did wrong," Beierle says, "And this community, this farmer's market community, came together and we raised $11,000 in less than a week so that they could make it, they could recoup some of those losses. As long as we can keep the farmer's market, we can keep this community together."
From Boise to Nampa to Sand Hollow, farmers are providing for the growing community with customers becoming ever more knowledgeable.
"I would say the biggest difference between when we started and today is the customer sophistication and knowledge of what they want," Burns adds.
