Someone once commented on my Instagram page, “Get you a man that looks at you the same way Jacob looks at his food.” It’s absolutely true. I love food. Especially since embarking on my own personal transformation journey, food has been a centerpiece. I loved the food I was eating when I had a poor diet, and I still love the food I am eating with my nutrient dense top-notch diet. This year, I decided to share that love of food with my peers and started a Farmer’s Market at my college.
It was certainly a lot of work, but it was absolutely worth it. If you are passionate about food: local food, sustainable food, healthy food, real food, clean food… let today’s article serve as inspiration and opportunity to create a Farmer’s Market at your own school. No matter where you are, no matter what your circumstance, it is very much possible. If I was able to do it at The Ohio State University, an institution with over 50,000+ students, you can do it too.
Let’s get right into how I started a Farmer’s Market at my college.
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase One: Pre-Planning
Before you can even begin to think about planning and starting a farmer’s market at your college, you’ll find it helpful to have a few initial things figured out. The first is how you’re even going to go about planning something of this magnitude.
My first step in pre-planning was to join the Undergraduate Student Government. Within Student Government, there was a Dining and Residence Life Subcommittee that I joined which paved the way for resources, connections, and contacts. Had I not joined USG, I wouldn’t have even considered it possible to start a Farmer’s Market. The organization showed me just how much power and influence a student can actually have on campus.
Joining your Undergraduate Student Government is not necessary, and perhaps one might not even exist within your institution. If that’s the case, no worries. You’ll just have some more work to do in the planning phase.
The next step in pre-planning is to find a team to help you. Trying to create a whole Farmer’s Market on your own would be incredibly stressful and probably no fun. There is not a chance my Farmer’s Market would have even occurred if it weren’t for the help of my team. Group efforts always produce the best results. Two or three people should do the trick as long as they are as passionate and excited about it as you are.
Finally, make sure you give yourself ample time to brainstorm, plan, and pull everything together. The timeline for creating my Farmer’s Market lasted about 6 months. Be patient and make sure you get started many months in advance.
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Two: Planning
Now that you’ve pre-planned a bit, you can start to brainstorm. I had three of four meetings of brainstorming with my team to get every idea we had on paper. No matter how crazy or absurd, we got them all in a google doc.
Location and Date of your Farmer’s Market
You’re going to want to start with the location and potential date of the market. Be mindful that many local farms are very busy during the beginning of the school year with other markets and events. However, the availability of fresh produce starts to decline in late October. A University Farmer’s Market that starts in the middle of September is most likely ideal.
My Farmer’s market was held on September 26th, coincidentally on the same day that I gave a TEDx talk. This coming year, we plan on holding it on World Food Day, which is October 16th to accommodate for other sustainable and food based organizations on campus. You don’t need to set anything in stone, but definitely jot some ideas down. Here’s what we had:
Potential vendors for your Farmer’s Market
Once you have potential locations, dates, and times, you can think about the vendors you want to bring to your market. Don’t exclude anyone in your immediate brainstorming! We included sustainable and food-based clubs, local farms, local businesses, chef’s around the area, and big name brands.
Target audience for your Farmer’s Market
Although it’s not crucial to nail this down immediately, it will help when it comes to marketing. Most likely, your target audience will be everyone: the students, faculty, staff, administrators, grad students, and even people living near the campus.
Incentives and activities for your Farmer’s Market
Now for the fun stuff! We brainstormed bouncy houses, cow milking demonstrations, a visit from the Columbus Zoo, giveaway items, and incentives to get more students to come!
Budgeting your Farmer’s Market
Once you have an idea of what exactly you want at your Farmer’s Market, you need to get an idea of what you can and can’t afford. If you’re in a club like Undergraduate Student Government, you’ll have access to all of their funds and won’t have to spend a penny! If not, you may have to look elsewhere for funding, but it’s not the end-all-be-all. At the end of the day, you can still have a wildly successful market without a huge budget. We budgeted $2300 and only ended up needing $50 for giveaways and promotional items.
If you really would like more money, try talking to your Student Activities Board, or Office of Student Life. You’ll never know if you don’t ask. It’s worth a shot.
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Three: Reaching out to vendors
After you have everything planned for your market, it’s time for you to get to work! Since you should still be a few months out from your market, I recommend sending out emails to possible vendors in two batches. The first, to send right away letting them know about what you’re planning, asking if they’re interested, and telling them you will keep in touch. The second email, should be sent about a month in advance, asking to confirm their attendance.
Before you send your first email, I advise you to put together a one-pager full of the important details about the event. Here’s what mine looked like:
You can include this one-pager in all of your initial emails to local farms, local businesses, brands, and sponsors. It is very professional and shows that you mean business.
Email template to send to Farmer’s Market vendors
One of the greatest pieces of advice I can give when reaching out to vendors is to make it personal. A lot of these local businesses and farms might be skeptical of such an event hosted by a couple of college students. Make sure you send them the one-pager and mention the specifics of why you want them at your Farmer’s Market.
This is the template that my team and I used to reach out to nearly 100 vendors.
After you send out a ton of emails, the responses will slowly start to filter in. If you don’t receive a response with two weeks, it’s ok to send a follow-up restating the same inquiry.
Keeping track of Farmer’s Market Vendor Responses
You are definitely going to want to create some sort of document to keep track of who you have reached out to, what they responded with, and what they might need (electricity, tables, tents, etc).
Google sheets or Microsoft excel are perfect and you can model your’s to look just like this:
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Four: Confirm Location, Date, & Time
While you are sending out emails to vendors, make sure you have either locked down a location or have one in mind for your Farmer’s market. My university has an outdoor space request online system that we had to go through to confirm our location. You may need to go through a similar channel to make sure you aren’t stepping on someone else’s event in the same area and at the same time.
Once you have the location, date, and time authorized, I advise taking out a map of the area and drawing out how you want the market to look. How do you want the booths to be spaced out? Do you want certain vendors in certain spots? Should the businesses be separated from the produce? Think about all the different aspects to your market and map them out. That way on the day of your market, everything will run smoothly and with ease.
*** Don’t forget to send the second batch of emails to all vendors who expressed interest letting them know you have a date, location, and time. It would also be courteous to provide general driving instructions and what they should do/go when they arrive on the day of the market.
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Five: Marketing
You’ve completed most of the grunt work, now you just need to start spreading the word. You don’t want to create this fabulous event and have nobody show up! On a college campus, social media can go a long way. I definitely recommend creating some graphics, posting them to your social media, and asking your friends and team to do the same.
A great free tool you can use is canva. They’re an online service that provides beautiful templates for graphics and flyers. I use them for just about everything on my blog and social media.
Along with social media, I would put up flyers all around campus with the date, location, and time of your market.
You may even want to reach out to your school’s newspaper to write a story about your market. It’s great publicity! Even better, ask all of the vendors to share the flyers and details within their circles of consumers. When I started the farmer’s market at my college, I reached out to our school newspaper and they wrote this article!
If you follow these tips, word about your awesome Farmer’s market will spread like a wildfire!
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Six: Finding Volunteers and set-up
By this point, you’ve completed almost all of the work necessary for starting your Farmer’s Market! All that is left is to find volunteers to help with set-up, giveaways, and general supervision for the day of your market; then of course, to actually set up your market!
You can look for volunteers within the clubs you’re involved in, post on social media, or just ask your team and close friends to help you out.
Setting up the Farmer’s Market
Woohoo! The day of your market has finally arrived. How exciting! All you need to do is set it up and watch as the people flood in.
I recommend getting to your desired location about an hour before the vendors are supposed to arrive to set-up any tents, tables, or walkway-arrows pointing towards the market. You should also get your giveaway items ready and other small activities like corn-hole or a slackline set-up.
When the vendors start to arrive have your volunteers guide them to their booth location and help any other set-up needs. There may be a few challenges that come up but it’ll all be ok! It may be hectic, but it will all work itself out!
Once the market is set-up, you’ve done it. You’ve started and created a Farmer’s Market at your college. Go around an enjoy some fresh produce, talk to the vendors, and talk to the people coming to your market! Enjoy the whole experience!
Starting a Farmer’s Market Phase Seven: Clean-up and follow-up
Congratulations on a fantastic market! Make sure to clean-up, help the vendors pack-up, and verify everyone who attended the event.
Since you of course want feedback on your Farmer’s Market, send out a feedback form to all of the vendors who were in attendance at the event. Ask them for what they liked, didn’t like, advice to improve the event, if the location was good, etc. Follow this form as an example.
You can also send out a survey to the student body if that’s an option available to you. It’s always a good idea to hear ideas from the people you actually are serving.
Use this feedback to make your Farmer’s Market event even better the next time!
Wrap-Up
Everybody loves Farmer’s Markets. They are great Instagram photo spots, full of great food, and people love to support the local and sustainable movements. I shared with you exactly how I started a Farmer’s Market at my college and hopefully you can use that information to do the same!
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at anytime!
