Year-end report shows size increase of farmer’s market
The smells, sights and sounds of the Moscow Farmer’s Market have been home to downtown Moscow for 37 years, and now a report indicates the market is growing in size.
For the past four years, the Moscow Farmer’s Market has been voted by the public to be the best farmer’s market in the state of Idaho.
“People like us,” said Kathleen Burns, the arts director for the City of Moscow and the staff liaison for the Farmer’s Market Commission. “People voted us in (the number one spot).”
One of the biggest improvements made in 2014 was the purchase of the over the street banners, Burns said. The one-time cost of $3,025 drew a lot more people to the market.
“(The banners) drew a lot of people to the market who wouldn’t visit it before,” she said.
Another reason Burns said the market might have grown is because it accepts Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) as a form of payment. The city has a partnership with Backyard Harvest, a national nonprofit organization, to convert EBT into currency that can be used at the market.
“(We are) the first market in the state of Idaho to do so,” she said.
Backyard Harvest had a grant from the federal government to double the value of EBT, Burns said. If someone exchanged $10 of EBT, they would receive $20 to spend at the market. Burns said the amount of money from these transactions annually increased by 137 percent from 2013 to 2014.
“It has been a more welcoming environment for everyone to participate in the market,” she said.
In many cases, buying fresh produce at a farmer’s market is cheaper than buying it at the grocery store, Burns said. She said because of this, the EBT acceptance has helped a lot of Palouse families buy locally grown produce.
The city instituted a new regulation in 2014, requiring all vendors to report the amount of money they made through market sales to the city. Last year, 83 percent of the vendors at the market reported, and made over $1.032 million in sales overall.
Burns said because 2014 was the first year this requirement was in place, there is no way to tell if the sales number is an increase from the previous year because only 56 percent of vendors reported their sales in 2013.
The city charges annual fees to all vendors at the market to cover the cost of running it. The fees are on a sliding scale, depending on how much space a vendor wants and where it wants to set up, Burns said.
There was a 17 percent increase in the amount of fees collected from 2013 to 2014. In 2013, the city collected more than $33,000 in fees and the following year it collected more than $39,000. Burns said the increase was due to the implementation of an additional $15 fee to cover the cost of using the Manage My Market software, which helps the city manage the administrative side of the market.
The fees collected do not fully cover the cost of the market, so the city subsidizes the rest, Burns said. It takes extra effort from multiple departments in the city to run the market, because the fees cannot cover the cost of its production.
In 2014, the city subsidized $24,446 of the cost of the market, a 34 percent decrease from 2013, when the city subsidized $36,945.
Burns said there are no plans to decrease the subsidization further, but the commission has yet to address the topic.
The market is a fun event to visit, Burns said. It has live music, cooking and canning demonstrations and crafts for sale. Students should come and check out the market when it returns the first Saturday of May, she said.
Graham Perednia can be reached at [email protected]