Farmers' Markets: Success, Failure, and Management Ecology By Gar ...

We read accounts and articles about how farmers’ markets positively impact the environment, towns, neighborhoods, and the lives of those who participate. What Stephenson’s book adds to these many and varied snapshots of particular markets or points in time is a historical context and some very interesting lessons about market dynamics as seen from the eyes of an anthropologist and the director of a small farm program in a land grant university.

Stephenson manages to walk a very elusive line between the theoretical requirements and interests of the academic community on the one hand, and the practical needs and interests of farmers’ market participants and practitioners on the other. In his straight-forward language, he starts with a colorful account of farmers’ markets from the turn of the last century to today, adding insights about what factors have contributed to the unprecedented growth we have seen recently. He looks in more depth, from a variety of perspectives, at the many particular farmers’ markets in Oregon, his home state, shedding light on how they work best and what challenges they face from the very local operational level to the national policy level.

For me, one of the unique elements of the book was the new understanding I gained from Stephenson’s practical, problem-based analysis of farmers’ markets, using political ecology as an analytical framework. This approach allows him to look at farmers’ markets from the contexts of both their natural and political environments, and to see the interactions between these two. In particular, Stephenson applies this political-ecology framework to the management of markets, which opens up new ways to understand the years of data and experience he has gathered about market successes and failures in Oregon. Market managers have already found the visual tool in Chapter 6 he created helpful in their own market assessments. Instead of a “how-to” recipe approach, Stephenson’s framework and visual tool allow both market managers and researchers to gain a more comprehensive view of the market(s) in which they are interested. One senses that if this tool were taken seriously, market managers, researchers, and interested members of the public could discover many new dimensions of their markets and find ways to improve them.