No, potatoes are not made in factories

I cannot believe the fuss being made because a farmers’ market is planned to start, at long last, in October at Ta’ Qali.

Everybody seems to be protesting: the brokers whose job it is to sell farmers’ produce to retailers, and who will now lose total control of the situation; the retailers who will find themselves with fresh competition as farmers begin to sell direct to consumers; and even the farmers themselves, who complain that they can’t possibly spend their Saturdays manning their stalls because who will look after their fields?

In a way, this is reassurance that everything is as it should be, that God is in his heaven and everything is in its place.

It would be a strange day if an initiative that means change, even positive change, were not met by the sight and sound of as many grown-ups as possible behaving like children with attention deficit disorder who are asked to switch to another task from the one in which they are engaged at present.

“Now maybe the farmers will learn that they always lose money when they sell direct to the consumer,” one hostile broker told a reporter, wishing failure on the enterprise even before it has begun.

But why should farmers lose money when they sell direct to the end-user, unless they do so exclusively and cut the brokers out altogether? Nobody is proposing that. It’s just not practical.

The current system has been described by the promoters of the farmers’ market as archaic, but it is not quite that. It is merely inefficient and inadequate.

It stands to reason that producers cannot sell only direct to the end-user. Their main business is production and not retail. Retail is a whole other kettle of fish – or melons – requiring a complete change in systems and thinking, to say nothing of considerable investment.

It takes little more than commonsense to work out that the production of an entire smallholding cannot be disposed of through one shop that opens every day of the week, still less a stall at a market held on Wednesday afternoons and all day on Saturday only.

Producers do not checker-board their fields with the typical variety of produce found on a greengrocer’s lorry: a little bit of pumpkin here, some artichokes there, perhaps a bit of lettuce, and oh, why not some broad beans in that corner over there? This does not make for efficient production and it certainly does not make for efficient retail either, because differentiated crops within a single holding make cultivation more time-consuming and expensive, putting up the price of the product.

If the bulk of your smallholding in March is given over to artichokes and broad beans, then you are obviously not going to be able to sell them direct to the consumer.

The consumer does not go fruit-and-vegetable shopping by trawling round to buy broad beans from Farmer Zammit and potatoes from Farmer Zarb. The consumer goes where the consumer can buy everything with the minimum of fuss and the best affordable quality.

That’s where the farmers’ market comes in. People go to a single place for their fruit and vegetables, but still buy them from different producers, wandering between the stalls. Farmer Zammit’s broad beans are stacked up at one stall, and Farmer Zarb’s potatoes at another.

Neither farmer is selling all his produce through that stall – obviously not, on one-and-a-half days a week and through a single outlet. The rest goes through the produce exchange in the normal manner. Those stalls at the market are just a way of bringing in some additional income for the grower, but they serve a purpose far more important than that.

They breach the gulf between the people who grow the food and the people who eat it. This helps build understanding and appreciation among those who eat of the efforts expended by those who grow. It is especially important for urban children, who are now completely divorced from the process. I remember one of my sons, who grew up in a house surrounded by fields of vegetables and the sound of tractors where others heard cars and buses, coming home from kindergarten to report with astonishment that Simon or Mary thought that potatoes are made in factories.

The curious thing is that the source of his astonishment was not that Simon or Mary didn’t know that potatoes grow in fields, but that they should have worked out they are not made in factories because they are not all the same size. Ah, but now they are: the child who knows carrots or bell-peppers only as same-sized items of perfection laid out on polystyrene trays and wrapped in polythene cannot be faulted for thinking they come from a factory. They look as though they do.

Farmers’ markets are an excellent opportunity for growers and producers to meet and talk to their end-customers and find out what they want, to promote new varieties, and to explain how things are grown. This invariably perks up people’s interest and makes them want to buy and try. The Ta’ Qali initiative couldn’t be more opportune, because curiosity about and interest in different foods is growing remarkably.

A farmers’ market – if done correctly – is above all an excellent public relations exercise for farmers, and one with the additional benefit of bringing in much-needed revenue. I think that the Wednesday afternoon stint will fail, because everyone who buys fruit and vegetables is either at work at that time or at home preparing for the return of children from school. But Saturdays should prove to be successful.

Many of the farmers’ markets I have been to elsewhere are above all social gathering-places, fulfilling the function of the traditional market-square in allowing people to connect with each other in the time-honoured way of buying and selling while exchanging the occasional pleasantry.

People make an outing of it; they wander around, talk, stop for coffee, and take time over choosing their produce and discussing it with the grower. It’s not all fruit and vegetables, either: there are all kinds of food, depending on the area. The local produce at one farmers’ market I went to in Perthshire was venison, Highland cattle sausages, oysters and salmon.

So please, can we give this farmers’ market a chance before disparaging its chances and hoping it flops? Anything that builds interest in Malta-grown produce is, at this stage, entirely welcome. Let’s run with it.

This article was published in The Malta Independent today.