Food Safety Challenges for Consumers and Producers at Farmers Markets

Finally, it feels like spring all over the country. Farmers markets are opening their stalls to customers who are hungry for local and organic fruits and vegetables. Goodbye to tasteless tomatoes and dry melons at the supermarket, and hello to heirloom apples and fresh-picked corn from family farms.

With each passing season, more farmers markets pop up nationwide, offering a fresh alternative to conventional grocery stores. Their budding popularity is surely welcome, by both consumers and farmers, but it also raises a question often overlooked: Is produce purchased directly from farmers markets any safer than purchased through a store? Most farmers markets are held in city parks, open fields and even parking lots, where sanitary controls are ad-hoc at best. If your supermarket moved its stock outside to the same kinds of locations, would you be so trusting?

You may also think that federal regulating agencies would therefore see the need to enforce even stronger food safety requirements. True, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) includes several regulations designed to manage these requirements, but these rules rarely apply to the farmers that consumers patronize at farmers markets. Even though farmers markets are increasing in number as a potential source of food borne illness, safety measures are largely ignored by consumers, farmers, and the government. Let’s take a closer look at the different concerns of each of these stakeholder groups to better understand the current situation.

The Halo Effect on Consumers

Why don’t consumers worry about safety of foods at their farmers market? One reason is their association with organic standards, which exclude the use of toxic pesticides on produce. While it is true that organic produce is free of chemical contamination, not all farmers are certified organic or adhere to organic methods. More significantly, organic standards do not protect against microbiological pathogens, which pose a far greater danger to the public. Yet because of their organic connection, farmers markets can create a “halo effect” around market practices that are unsanitary.

In the general consumer mindset, a farmers market is “healthy” and therefore “safe.” But it’s an erroneous, potentially dangerous equation if produce is mishandled during packaging, transportation, and display. In fact, market researchers have reported that food safety behaviors were infrequently practiced, such as washing them at home before consumption. Some of these customers are senior adults, pregnant women, mothers of small children, and people with compromised immune systems – those at highest risk of serious illness or death if infected by E. coli, salmonella, or listeria. In fact, reported outbreaks linked to farmers markets are increasing each year, requiring consumer protection.

The Economic Effect on Farmers

In general, farmers do their best to ensure their produce is safe – after all, they depend on local communities for their livelihood. Still, many farmers are relative newcomers to farmers markets and may not have much experience with food safety issues and best practices. More importantly, many small, family farms cannot afford certifications that publicly demonstrate safety practices, and although farmers may take extreme precautions, consumers have no way of confirming that their practices meet government standards.

Transportation vehicles between the farm and the market are often privately owned and not equipped with regulation monitoring devices. Distances traveled may be short or products transported may not need temperature controls, however, in many other cases farmers travel many miles and transport perishable food products produced at the farm. If a customer is infected, it would be easy to trace the source to the farmer’s location, who would be legally liable for damages and most likely suffer bad publicity impacting future sales.

Finding a Balance with the FDA and USDA

If the federal government has not enforced many safety measures for farmers markets, it’s not because they’re ignoring the health of consumers. Rather, they’re protecting the economic vulnerability of family farms. Excessive compliance costs could put farmers out of business, and shut down farmers markets for good. To accommodate farmers who fear that complying with the rigorous requirements in FSMA could put them out of business, Congress passed the Tester-Hagan exemption for small farms that sell food locally.

If a farm qualifies, the farmer does not have to comply with the record-keeping and technical reporting requirements of FSMA. Neither are they required to register as an official food facility. Critics of these reduced standards point out that pathogens do not discriminate between small and large farms. It begs the question: shouldn’t safety regulations be increasing rather than decreasing?

Currently, both the FDA and the USDA recognize the dilemma resulting from the conflict of protecting both consumers and farmers. The data needed to support more intense regulations for small direct-to-consumer producers is currently insufficient. It is quite possible that the short supply line from farmer to consumer reduces risk and eases traceability, and thus fulfills the spirit of FSMA compliance.

In the meantime, both agencies have been publishing Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) for smaller farms to follow in order to keep consumers safe from food borne illness. Among these measures are precautions to contain the threats of contamination at different points along the supply chain. We’ll review these food safety guidelines in part 2 of this series. Stay tuned!

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