The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Farmers market keeps supply chain intact
By 7:45 on a pleasant Thursday morning, the cars, trucks and vans started pulling into the parking lot of the Lunenburg Arena, arriving from lovely sounding places like Petite Riviere, Cherry Hill, Lahave and Greenfield, making the run from a few minutes away in Lunenburg, and an hour distant in Halifax.
In the time of the plague, the vendors at the Lunenburg Farmers Market are ushered into the building in 15-minute-increments, so they arrive early on market day.
One-by-one, they carry in their eggs, salad greens, berries and mushrooms, their hens, free-range chickens, and pasture-raised lamb, their pork, beef and veal, their sausages, and salted fish, their homemade pies and breads, their natural skin care creams, their fresh flowers, honey, jams and herbal teas.
“It’s our 35th year,” market manager Ashley Marlin said when I asked about the market’s longevity.
She told me how it started, back in 1984, inside Lunenburg’s former train station, and how it moved around a few times over the years until landing in its current location where it has run year-round for most of the past decade
They’ve only missed one Thursday since the pandemic hit, forcing them to abandon the traditional farmers market model of vendors selling their wares at individual tables, for an on-line system in which customers arrive, line up outside and are handed their individual orders without ever going into the building. Which is why I was there. Among COVID-19’S many lessons has been the tenuousness of our food supply chain. In April, the United Nations World Food Program predicted that the pandemic’s impact will mean that more than a quarter of a billion people will suffer acute hunger around the world, more than twice the number going hungry before the virus hit.
As TIME magazine recently pointed out, harvests are going to waste because workers, unable to travel, or frightened of catching the virus, won’t pick them. Farmers are in ruin because restaurants are in lockdown. Export bans mean some countries are being denied dietary staples.
Amid all of this uncertainty, it was good, then, to learn that Nova Scotia has 55 farmers markets, the most per capita of any province in the country, doing their bit to help ensure our food security.
It was good, as well, to be at the Lunenburg market, the largest on the South Shore with 35 vendors and 250 orders, worth $19,000, per week. There, Kevin Veinotte arrived mid-morning with his van full of grass-fed beef and freerange chicken and lamb.
“This is a way to keep money in the local economy,” says the seventh-generation Lunenburg County farmer, whose farm’s sales have risen 10-fold since becoming a vendor there.
Patricia Watson, who arrived for her order at about 1:30, doesn’t eat much meat. What brings her back, week after week, are the baked
“I really loved when we could all get together. It was a way to connect to the local community.”
Patricia Watson
goods, the edible flowers, the salad greens and the apple cider.
“Everything is so fresh,” she said, which reminds her of the farmers market she used to visit in Philadelphia, before moving to East Lahave 26 years ago.
“I really loved when we could all get together. It was a way to connect to the local community.”
She was happy, therefore, to learn that, starting next week, the Lunenburg market will add an outdoor dimension to the online operation.
It won’t be like the pre-pandemic days, when everyone just milled about.
Instead, vendors will line up, tailgate party-like, at the back of the vehicle and customers will make their orderly, socially distanced-way from purveyor to purveyor.
Laura Mulrooney, the owner of Julien’s Bakery, looks back fondly to the old days.
On Thursday she arrived at about 8:30 a.m., her cube van packed with croissants, quiches, loafs of bread, and packets of cookies, along with 300 boxes from an independent grocer in Chester, for the market’s online orders.
Her bakery’s sales, about half what they were PRE-COVID, improve when customers can see the artistry of her baker husband Didier Julien close up.
Online sales, on the other hand, ensured that they didn’t have to lay off any of their dozen employees during the challenging recent months.
“Without these farmers markets,” said Mulrooney, who also sells her wares each week in Chester and Hubbards, “that just wouldn’t have been possible.”
It’s all connected, you see, like a chain that needs to stay intact if our stomachs are to stay full.