memes

This depends on your farmer's market entirely.

Plenty of the non-fruit/veg stands are also small shops trying to go somewhere with more foot traffic.

I literally know a guy who did a bunch of backyard farming and sold stuff at these, so they aren't all fakes at least

nothing but assholes buying shit wholesale

They're not all fake. Some are. Look for local farms, know your growing seasons. The wholesalers give them so little for their crop it still makes sense for them to sell to you if you'll buy it.

Even a real farm will wholesale you strawberries out of season if you'll buy them, they just want to augment their income.

My local place labels where stuff comes from and when it's corn or pepper season, it's WAY cheaper than the local market.

I guess not all of them, based on the comments. But yeah, my local "farmer's market" is one of those. Literally just grocery store produce that came off the same truck with the store stickers on them, but marked up one or two hundred percent.

Just look at their table.

If its in generic produce baskets and they are selling like 4 different things that are all available locally, yeah its probably from a local farm.

If the baskets are branded and they are selling 50 different things, yeah its probably from a distributor. (And that ok Tbh)

I live in the northern US. Farmer Brown is not growing bananas here.

Such assholes of course also exist, but here on the local farmers market, the one selling vegetables indicates what is stuff he grew himself, vs things he bought from elsewhere. So if you want to buy things from the actual farmer standing there, you're perfectly capable of doing so (alas, just selling those things isn't really an option. Not enough people come to such markets if they can't find pretty much every vegetable they want...)

And regarding the price in this meme, that's also a complex story. Can indeed be inefficiencies of smaller scale distribution of the same stuff. But on the other hand there is organic and "organic" farming. There is always a large push by the large scale organic farmers to keep the requirements of being organic as low as possible. So yeah, there is a big difference between large scale farms that just make the bare minimum requirements for being called organic, vs smaller scale farms that actually try to make their farm respect nature (which is kind of the point of being an organic farmer).

And in the end, it's like all things in life, want to do it properly? Then spend time on actually learning who's who, what's what, if there is a farmers market, if they're serious, i'm sure you can visit their farms. You can learn about the methods they use, and the impact of those methods, and then compare it to other methods of production, and see if it's worth it for you, and see if the quality difference is worth it.

I know that I buy from resellers, actual farmers have a farm to run and don't have time to run a stall. The produce is grown by actuall small farmers because the taste is markedly different