Alberta Farmers’ Market Association Market Express Newsletter

Published Periodically by the Alberta Farmers’ Market Association

May 2011 1-866-754-AFMA (2362)

www.albertamarkets.com info@albertamarkets.com

Hello everyone! What a winter that was, I am so relieved that spring has finally sprung. As I am sure you are all aware, we have a completely new board. Everyone is busy figuring out our individual niche on the board, and getting to know each other. I personally am quite impressed with the individuals and really look forward to getting some great stuff done with this group. With your support I think this will be a successful and profitable year for all of us. Your Board: Tonia Chrapko – President and Director Northeast Region Debbie Mertin – VP and Director Southern Region Stephanie Szakacs – Secretary and Director Central Region Tristina Branconnier – Treasurer and Member At Large Travis Braucht – Director Peace Region Debbie Grant – Director North Central Region Frances Petryshyn – Director Northwest Region Kevin Kossowan – Member at Large

The 100 km Kitchen Party

In May of 2009 Brazeau County launched the 100km Kitchen Party Project, the project will officially wrap up December 31st of 2011. However, several accomplishments of this project will continue on indefinitely. Based on the 100 mile diet philosophy the 100km Kitchen Party puts a Canadian spin on it. All components of the project are based on utilizing the foods grown within a 100km radius of Drayton Valley, this takes in portions of the Counties of Parkland, Yellowhead, Woodlands, Lac St. Anne, Clearwater, Leduc, Wetaskiwin, and Ponoka. The people behind this project are Kelly Starling, Director of Economic Development, Brazeau County, Mary Gowans, Margarita Pischke, Bonnie Ferguson-Scott and Judith Solkowski. The 100km Kitchen Party is sustainable in the triple bottom line of economics, environment and social. It is a huge 3 year project that includes:

• Traditional Food Processing - canning, pickling and making preserves utilizing foods grown within the 100Km radius of Drayton Valley.

• International Food Processing (cooking courses) • Food Processing Cooperative - the formation of a small

food processing cooperative. This business will produce food that is grown locally, it will be processed locally and sold locally (we consider local the 100km radius).

• 100km Map; this map lists 58 different sources of local food, including 17 Alberta Approved Farmers’ Markets.

For more information go to their website at http://brazeaukitchenparty.ca/ You will find helpful and interesting links for this eat local initiative. If you have something to say, something you would

like to see in our newsletter, please send it to us! We

would appreciate your

input.

EXTRA!! EXTRA!! Do you see our logo? It is up there in the top right corner. Do you love it? Do you readily recognize it? Do you think anyone else recognizes it? Do you think you could do better? If you, or one of your friends, or even a very talented offspring, have an idea for a logo we could all get behind, PLEASE, send them to us. We will bring a large sampling of the best submissions to the next annual general meeting and let the membership decide. And don’t bother sending in the Sunnygirl, she is taken. Send your submissions to:

Alberta Farmers' Market Association

PO Box 69071 13040-137 Avenue

Edmonton, AB T5L 5E3 Phone: 1-866-754-AFMA (2362)

Fax: 780-669-5779

email: info@albertamarkets.com

Darwell Farmers’ Market

Sundays 11:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m. March 9th to

December 21st In the Darwell Centennial Hall

Tips for selling to Restaurants

Local restaurants could be a huge opportunity for local growers and food processors. If you are thinking about growing your business into the restaurant market here are a few pointers from the inside.

Do not call restaurants at random. Find specific restaurants that might need your product and target those.

If you already sell to restaurants, let the chef know. Name names. Knowing that you sell to other restaurants makes us more comfortable in dealing with you.

find out the chef’s and the owner’s names. The chef is the person who usually makes the decisions on what to buy. These people are frequently the same person in small restaurants.

Go on a slow day – Tuesday or Wednesday – in the mid afternoon. do not call over lunch, dinner or on Fridays or Saturdays

You need to get your product in the mouth of the chef. Go to the restaurant with a sample of your product, a small sample, preferably ready to eat.

We want flavour; we know it is hard to make great tasting food with ingredients that don’t taste great.

If your product requires cooking, take you product cooked – do not season or flavour it, but a little salt is OK. Remember. you are not selling a dish, you are selling an ingredient, and the chef need to taste what you are selling, not taste what he can do with it.

Try and understand the needs of the restaurants. Small high-end restaurants need small amounts of

specialty products. High volume casual are going to need large amounts of cost effective product.

most chefs do not want the bulk of their products on Saturday. We need the products in the restaurant Wednesday or Thursday so we can prep them for our busiest days.

If all else fails, make a reservation and take a sample of your product. Go in for dinner (on a slow day) and ask to speak to the owner. They will take the sample from you, you are their customer.

Article by Jessie Radies. Jessie Radies owns The Blue Pear Restaurant and is the founder of Live Local Alberta

From: The 100 Mile Diet . Org

Why Eat Local?

1. Taste the difference.

At a farmers’ market, most local produce has been picked inside of 24 hours. It comes to you ripe, fresh, and with its full flavor, unlike supermarket food that may have been picked weeks or months before. Close-to-home foods can also be bred for taste, rather than withstanding the abuse of shipping or industrial harvesting. Many of the foods we ate on the 100-Mile Diet were the best we’d ever had.

2. Know what you’re eating.

Buying food today is complicated. What pesticides were used? Is that corn genetically modified? Was that chicken free range or did it grow up in a box? People who eat locally find it easier to get

answers. Many build relationships with farmers whom they trust. And when in doubt, they can drive out to the farms and see for themselves.

3. Meet your neighbors.

Local eating is social. Studies show that people shopping at farmers’ markets have 10 times more conversations than their counterparts at the supermarket. Join a community garden and you’ll actually meet the people you pass on the street.

4. Get in touch with the seasons.

When you eat locally, you eat what’s in season. You’ll remember that cherries are the taste of summer. Even in winter, comfort foods like squash soup and pancakes just make sense–a lot more sense than flavorless cherries from the other side of the world.

5. Discover new flavors.

Ever tried sunchokes? How about purslane, quail eggs, yerba mora, or tayberries? These are just a few of the new (to us) flavors we sampled over a year of local eating. Our local spot prawns, we learned, are tastier than popular tiger prawns. Even familiar foods were more interesting. Count the types of pear on offer at your supermarket. Maybe three? Small farms are keeping alive nearly 300 other varieties–while more than 2,000 more have been lost in our rush to sameness .

6. Explore your home.

Visiting local farms is a way to be a tourist on your own home turf, with plenty of stops for snacks.

7. Save the world.

A study in Iowa found that a regional diet consumed 17 times less oil and gas than a typical diet based on food shipped across the country. The ingredients for a typical British meal, sourced locally, traveled 66 times fewer “food miles.” Or we can just keep burning those fossil fuels and learn to live with global climate change, the fiercest hurricane seasons in history, wars over resources…

8. Support small farms.

We discovered that many people from all walks of life dream of working the land–maybe you do too. In areas with strong local markets, the family farm is reviving. That’s a whole lot better than the jobs at Wal-Mart and fast-food outlets that the globalized economy offers in North American towns.

9. Give back to the local economy.

A British study tracked how much of the money spent at a local food business stayed in the local economy, and how many times it was reinvested. The total value was almost twice the contribution of a dollar spent at a supermarket chain .

10. Be healthy.

Everyone wants to know whether the 100-Mile Diet worked as a weight-loss program. Well, yes, we lost a few pounds apiece. More importantly, though, we felt better than ever. We ate more vegetables and fewer processed products, sampled a wider variety of foods, and ate more fresh food at its nutritional peak. Eating from farmers’ markets and cooking from scratch, we never felt a need to count calories.

11. Create memories.

A friend of ours has a theory that a night spent making jam–or in his case, perogies–with friends will always be better a time than the latest Hollywood blockbuster. We’re convinced.

12. Have more fun while traveling.

Once you’re addicted to local eating, you’ll want to explore it wherever you go. On a trip to Mexico, earth-baked corn and hot-spiced sour oranges led us away from the resorts and into the small towns. Somewhere along the line, a mute magician gave us a free show over bowls of lime soup in a little cantina.

If you like what you just read, go to: http://100milediet.org/why-

eat-local and join their group. There is a pledge you can make on line, plenty of instruction and guidance.

Upcoming:

JUNE 2011

June 11 – Learn to Build an Earthen Oven – SAP Farms 9:00 – 5:00

Southern Alberta Permaculture www.southernalbertapermaculture.com

2020: Thinking Out The Future

On a daily basis, it’s often difficult to see the forest for the trees. But if you look along the trails that thread between the timbers, you can see where we’ve come from – and where that path might be leading. For agriculture, there are some important perspectives to keep in view en route to 2020.

Wildwood Farmers’ Market Yellowhead’s Littlest Market!!

Fridays, 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. May 3rd to Oct 7th

Call Wilma Swinkels for information 780 325 2424

The major issue won’t be with the technologies per se but the disparity between those who use them and those who don’t. It’s not just a question of large farms and efficiencies of scale – small farmers can effectively apply technologies to enhance quality and maximize margins. But appropriate use of new technologies in the next 10 years will be a crucial factor in the future of any farm. Local is “in”, and it’s not just about food miles. Local is about quality, about niche markets and about a skill set that is different from bulk commodity production. There are domestic opportunities with aging baby boomers, a burgeoning culinary market for new Canadians, and new perspectives and technology that make urban agriculture the most exciting niche market in decades. Local means having retail skill, a marketing plan and being adaptable. What do you (profitably) do with 500 pounds of fresh blueberries when thunderstorms keep customers away? Providing them to local restaurants to make smoothies would be one idea. Whatever the response, the ability to think differently will be essential on the road to 2020. Experts an article featured in AgriSuccess, November 2010, reprinted with permission. By Hugh Maynard – Hugh is a specialist in agricultural communications based in Ormstown, Que. A graduate in farm management from McGill University, Hugh is a seasoned journalist and broadcaster.

Farmers’ Market Food Safety Home Study Course Now Available! In an effort to ensure that all food being sold at Alberta approved farmers’ markets is the safest possible, Alberta Health Services in partnership with Agriculture and Rural Development (ARD) and Alberta Health and Wellness, has developed a home study course for approved farmers’ market managers and food vendors. According to the ARD Guidelines which govern all approved farmers’ markets, this course will be mandatory for all market managers and food vendors who have not already completed and who are not required to complete the food safety training described under Section 31 of the Food Regulation. AHS has just made the course available online at www.ephs.ca Click on Fact Sheets and Forms Home Study Course for Farmers’ Markets. Eileen Kotowich, Farmers’ Market Specialist with ARD, will be contacting all market managers and food vendors within the next week with additional details. If you have any questions about this course or any other matter pertaining to the Guidelines, please contact Eileen at 780-853-8223 or email at eileen.kotowich@gov.ab.ca .

Editorial Page

Hinton Farmers’ Market Society

Thursdays 11:00 a.m. to 2:00p.m. Mar 31 to Dec 15

Looking for poultry, elk and bison if you have the product,

we have the demand Call Barb for information 780 865 4362

News from Alberta Agriculture & Rural Development:

Empty Tables!! There is something very off-putting about walking into a market and seeing a bunch of empty tables. Customers not only notice it, they ask “what happened, why so many empty tables?” This is just as bad as when a customer walks into a market at 15 minutes before closing and sees vendors already packing up their tables. That’s not really very inviting. The packing up early issue is easy to solve. Don’t allow it. The empty table problem is a little different. The empty table may be because a vendor has sold out, the market had a “no show” or sometimes, as I have found out, a manager has put out the table whether there was a vendor for that table or not. This should never occur. Empty tables just look bad, especially in smaller markets. Some suggestions I would make are:

1) have extra tablecloths ready & allow a neighbouring vendor to spread their products over the empty table (at no extra cost).

2) have extra tablecloths and spread out brochures, posters for the market, or even a request for a vendor for that table.

3) have extra tablecloths ready and purchase cookies or other snacks from a vendor, set extra chairs around the table and encourage customers to take a break.

4) if the table is empty because a vendor sold out, cover the table with a tablecloth and have the vendor leave a nicely prepared sign stating “Sold Out” the sign could also list the products sold and a promise “to see you next week”, or when ever the vendor is to return.

5) one last remedy, as many markets do, don’t allow sold out vendors to leave.

Although markets are each stand alone businesses, we do have an effect on each other. If a customer has a less than satisfactory experience at one market; that just may make them less likely to attend another, even if the customer is an adamant supporter. Consider this, if a regular shopper of larger markets has a bad experience at a small rural market, she may assume that rural markets are not for her. Every customer matters, every market matters, every vendor matters. by Frances Petryshyn Please send your thoughts and opinions to our editor dpetryshyn@xplornet.com please put “editor” in the header

Do You Know The Labeling Requirements??

As food vendors at an Alberta Approved Farmers’ Market, we have certain exemptions, but we also have certain requirements as far as labeling goes. First of all, we are exempt from the nutrition label, unless we are selling prepared meats, and unless we make a health claim. We are exempt from the bilingual labeling as long as we are selling a locally produced product in an area which is predominately one language or the other. Mind you, if you spoke only French and found a vendor that voluntarily provided the French translation, wouldn’t you be pleased? We have no exemption from the following:

• Common name of the product (e.g. gingersnap cookies)

• Net quantity (weight, volume or number of) • Dealer identity and principal place of business

(name & address) • An accurate, honest list of ingredients in

descending order of proportion ( don’t say pure when it is artificial or butter if it is margarine)

• Durable life date if product has shelf life of 90 days or less

• Allergen labeling (pine nuts, peanuts, eggs, milk, wheat, soy, sesame seeds, seafood, added sulphites and mustard)

Further to this, one of the biggest advantages we have over grocery stores, is that our customers trust us. We must honour that trust by being above reproach, by being worthy of that trust. Encourage those vendors in your market that are not fully compliant to become so. It is our responsibility to protect our reputation, our good name. We are all in this together. by Frances Petryshyn

Alberta Farmers' Market Association

PO Box 69071 13040-137 Avenue

Edmonton, AB T5L 5E3

Phone: 1-866-754-AFMA (2362) Fax: 780-669-5779