10/04/2025
We all know it’s been a rough year for farmers. So what can YOU do in your day-to-day to help? Here are our top five steps to take this fall:
5. More scratch cooking! It’s good for you, your budget, and farmers’ sales.
4. Buy in bulk if you can during harvest season! Help farmers make space in their own coolers, and you’ll often get a deal. Ask your farmer for storage tips if you’re nervous.
3. Tell a friend about Bumper Crop and Maine Harvest Bucks. These are our two voucher programs that brought about $1.5million in *direct* sales to farmers’ market vendors in 2024, with more and counting this year.
Bumper Crop: https://www.mainefarmersmarkets.org/bumpercrop/
Maine Harvest Bucks: https://mainefarmersmarkets.org/were-fundraising-for-food-access/
2. Monkey see, monkey do: bring your friends to market, show them your market hauls, talk about what you’ve been cooking, and have conversations about the impact local food has on your life and your community. This is how we keep building a strong local food system.
1. Buy DIRECT from the producer!!! When you buy from a farmer at a farmers’ market, farm stand, or CSA, 100% of your grocery budget goes into the hands of the person who took the risk and did the labor to produce your food. Business owners know best how to use those funds to keep going and get to grow for another year. Wholesale is an important supplement for many Maine farms, but producers receive a lower price. In the worst cases, farmers have no say in determining the price they’ll get from the wholesale buyer—it’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation that can put producers in a desperate choice between losing all of their investment in a crop, or selling at a loss just to recoup some money. This is common in the fall when farmers run out of storage space and the wholesale market is flooded with vegetables that need refrigeration. If your farmers are making the effort to show up at direct sales sites like farmers’ markets, it means they need full retail value to make their business model sustainable.
Did you know that MFFM is the only organization dedicated to supporting direct sales for farmers? We were founded by farmers and are steered and staffed by farmers, so we understand that farmers and markets need flexibility and self-determination to thrive. Direct sales empower that!
