Although the Weiser family of Tehachapi, California, may have its quirky members, none of them could really be considered revolutionaries. And when they started selling their produce at farmers’ markets back in the early 1980s, they weren’t trying to change the world; they just wanted to get what they thought was a fair return on their labor.
Even so, what began as the agrarian dream of a former high school guidance counselor is now a business that sells its fruits and vegetables all over the United States and grosses more than $1 million a year. But if that big-money talk makes you think of gentlemen farmers wheeling and dealing over the long-distance lines, forget it. You can still find one of the sons, Alex Weiser—small and wiry and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt—at several of the more than a dozen farmers’ markets around Southern California every week. Indeed, the Weiser family represents one of the most profound transformations in American agriculture in the past twenty-five years—the return of the small family farm as a viable way of doing business.
Just when it seemed that modern farms had to get bigger or die, along came farmers’ markets to save the day. By going to the market, growers were able to realize the full cash value of their produce, rather than the measly 20 percent or less that was the norm in mainstream agriculture. The markets also allowed farmers to experiment with new crops that might not have fit into the supermarket produce section and even paid them a premium for doing that. In so doing, farmers’ markets shook the foundations of the produce industry by unleashing consumer demand for fruits and vegetables that were more varied and more flavorful than those that had been offered before and demonstrated that shoppers were willing to pay for them. But the revolution hardly stopped there.
The changes that these markets introduced also had an effect on the markets themselves. What once were simple gatherings that accomplished nothing more than allowing farmers to sell directly to their customers evolved into something much more vibrant and complex. Ultimately, the changes altered the way the growers who sold at the markets farmed, even down to the choices of the crops they grew.
In the Weisers’ case, selling directly to consumers is no longer anywhere near their biggest source of income, but their presence at farmers’ markets remains the most important factor in their success. The market stands give the family the credibility to charge higher than commodity prices even for fruits and vegetables they don’t sell at the markets. By growing good food and then getting good prices for it, the Weisers have been able to support four families and more than a dozen employees on only a little more than a hundred acres. Still, they are quick to point out that working farmers’ markets is only marginally more profitable than selling to wholesale accounts. They say that their farmers’-market expenses range from 70 to 75 percent, and it takes a heckuva lot of work—certainly more than loading up the truck and driving to the packing shed.
Using farmers’ markets as a springboard to greater things was not the Weisers’ intent when they started. It all developed pretty naturally. The family got into agriculture in 1976, when the father, Sid, retired from his job as a gang counselor at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Sid had always wanted to farm, so when he learned of a 160-acre apple orchard for sale, he jumped on it. He soon wished he hadn’t. “After about five years, we nearly went bankrupt,” he says. Alex, the son who runs the farming end of the operation these days, remembers his first experiences trying to sell their apples through the normal commodity route: “We’d take them to the packing shed, and they’d beat you down for a buck. We were really passionate about what we were growing, and they thought that was kind of funny.” Every grower who has ever sold at a farmers’ market has some version of the same story. The Weisers started going to the farmers’ markets as an experiment to see if they could earn some quick money to tide them over between commercial sales. The strategy worked. “Going the regular way, we might not make enough money to cover the costs of packing and production,” Alex remembers. “But I was bringing in cash from the markets.”
Eventually, the Weisers ripped out the apple trees they’d started with (even at farmers’ markets, it’s tough to compete with the flood of fruit from the Northwest). Today the Weisers grow dozens of fruits and vegetables. Melons and potatoes are their specialties, and they produce dozens of varieties of each. “The markets allow farmers to find niches,” Alex says.
His ideas for new things to plant come from a variety of sources. He is constantly scouring seed catalogs and Web sites (“farmer porn,” one family member calls them), and the markets work not only as a place to sell crops but also as a source of new ideas. Sometimes Alex will see things at a competitor’s stand that he wants to try. For instance, during the spring lilacs are a big moneymaker at farmers’ markets. The Weisers had always had lilacs on the farm, but it wasn’t until they saw the lines forming at another vendor’s stand that they thought about selling them.
More frequently, a customer will ask about a fruit or vegetable she has bought someplace else or remembers from her childhood. And quite often chefs will make special requests. At the begging of one regular restaurant customer, Weiser planted something called crosnes, a knotted white tuber that is all the rage in France. Other farmers have even gone so far as to venture out into the hillsides to dig wild stinging nettles, arugula and fennel when their customers have asked for them.
The restaurant connection is one of the most important links in the Weiser family’s market chain, and it was established slowly and almost accidentally. The number of chefs who shop at farmers’ markets is relatively few, but they can make a significant difference to small farmers. First, they buy in bulk. It is much easier to sell eighty bunches of beets to one customer than one bunch to eighty people. Because chefs buy in such large quantities (and because, unlike home shoppers, they really need those beets if they have put them on the menu), the Weisers began to let them call in their orders in advance to reserve their purchases.
The next step was subtle but critical: some chefs who couldn’t make it to the market every week started asking the Weisers to deliver to their restaurants. The family didn’t have the trucks or the manpower to do that, so they arranged with the restaurants’ normal produce purveyors to make the deliveries. And then those purveyors started asking about picking up a little extra to sell to their other clients.
Thus, without really trying to, the Weisers got back in the wholesale business. But this time, because of the reputation they had earned by working the markets, they were able to get well above standard wholesale prices for their crops. Indeed, Alex points out, sometimes their wholesale customers are willing to pay even more than the folks at the markets. Pretty soon the Weisers were selling to a dozen different wholesale companies—a couple of them with national distribution—and their produce began showing up at high-end supermarkets around the country. This is not unusual. According to one survey, more than 70 percent of growers who sell at farmers’ markets also sell though traditional channels.
Now, although the markets are at the core of the Weisers’ business, sales outside the markets make up the bulk of the farm’s income. Dan Weiser, Alex’s brother and the business brain in the family, estimates that sales to restaurants and wholesalers now account for 60 to 65 percent of the farm’s business. And, he says, he’d like to take that number to 90 percent, an idea that makes Alex noticeably uncomfortable.
Although Alex acknowledges the need to expand the business, he insists that farmers’ markets and sales to the public should always be at the center of the operation. “The market gives us the confidence we need to grow stuff,” he says. “It confirms our ideas about what people are looking for. Also, knowing that I can always sell stuff here gives me leverage I wouldn’t have otherwise when dealing with produce companies. If they can’t give me a decent price, I know I can move it myself rather than just taking what they want to give me. I know I’m not going to lose my shirt on something; I’ve always got my costs covered. Farmers’ markets give us a little control over our fates.”
Furthermore, the markets act as magnets for other business. Specialty produce companies regularly troll farmers’ markets looking for new items and suppliers. “It’s kind of a showroom for new products,” Alex says. Executives from big specialty produce wholesalers often come by the stand, whip out digital cameras and snap pictures of the vegetables on display. Dan, who joined the family business a couple of years ago after working in entertainment marketing, says, “The word we used for it at Disney was ‘synergy.’ We couldn’t do restaurants or wholesale without the farmers’ markets. And if we were doing just farmers’ markets, we wouldn’t be able to make enough money to keep going.”
Of course, not every farmers’ market grower is fronting a million-dollar business. Many are just scraping along. But sometimes even that is a marked improvement for the farmers in question, and some of them have had a significant effect on the produce industry. There is no better example of that than the more than seven hundred Asian American farmers, predominantly Laotian, who live in Fresno County, California. More than half of the certified farmers’ market growers in the area—the richest fruit and vegetable farmland in the country—are of Asian descent. Although their economic impact is hard to quantify, the statistical category “Asian Vegetables” accounts for more than $10 million in sales in Fresno County alone, a figure that is growing every year.
Many of the Laotian farmers came to the United States after the Vietnam War. Some had fought in the United States “secret war” in Southeast Asia and suffered years of hardship after the Americans left the region in 1973. Christian groups throughout the United States sponsored the immigration of many Laotians at that time, and gradually a large number of these people relocated to Fresno. Here they live, frequently in grinding poverty, as small farmers. Against all odds, they are not only succeeding in feeding their families, but they are also changing the way we eat. Almost every farmers’ market in California has at least one Laotian farm stand. Sometimes the Laotians sell standard American fruits and vegetables with which they were familiar in their homeland. Cherry tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are mainstays. Often, however, the stands are stocked with a wealth of produce that, to American eyes, seems quite exotic: green and purple yard-long beans; bright orange melons that look like spiny cucumbers and have huge pomegranate-red seeds; squash that can be eaten like zucchini when they’re young or used as a bath sponge when they mature; stalky Chinese broccoli; giant white daikon radishes; eggplants of every color and shape; water spinach; exotic mints, basils and other herbs; and the tender green shoots of pea plants.
So numerous are these growers that the local morning farm reports are now broadcast in the Hmong language by a Hmong county extension agent named Michael Yang. (Many of the Laotians are Hmong, a group that lives in the mountains of northern Laos.) A short, slightly stocky man with a quiet demeanor, Yang seems much like any other county extension agent except that when he steps into the sun, he pulls on a conical straw hat instead of a cap with a seed company logo. Yang’s family immigrated to the United States in 1980, when he was eight years old. His father had worked for the Americans in Laos. After he was killed, it fell to Michael, the oldest son, to guide his mother and brothers and sisters through the jungle to Thailand and the refugee camps there. At one point he was bitten by a two-foot-long centipede and was certain he was going to die. His mother carried him on her back for three days until he could walk again.
Much of Yang’s work is done at the Hmong American Community educational farm. The twenty-acre plot is divided in half, with separate fields for the lowland Lao (another Laotian people) and mountain Hmong farmers. Partly the separation is necessary because the two groups prefer different vegetables, but there is well-documented friction between the groups as well. The Hmong side is planted with cool-weather leafy vegetables and herbs that grow through the winter: bok choy, Chinese broccoli, water spinach and napa cabbage, as well as various kinds of mint and basil. The Lao side is covered with trellises garlanded with bitter melon, yard-long beans and loofah. Long, lavender Chinese eggplants and small, round, green Thai ones grow in rows.
New vegetables are added every season, some from families’ private seed collections. Some items are so obscure that Yang says they have to be sent to the University of California at Davis for genotyping to be identified. There is also a financial imperative to their experimentation. Even as the demand for Asian ingredients grows, small farmers find it difficult to compete against larger operations in the United States and Mexico, so the Laotian growers are constantly looking for an edge with niche products.
Most of the produce the Laotian farmers grow goes through normal distribution channels, but much of it also is sold at farmers’ markets up and down the state. Fresno farmers travel as far as San Diego and San Francisco—up to six hours each way—to sell their crops. At wholesale a 30-pound case of eggplants might sell for $6. At the farmers’ market growers can get $1 a pound. This pays enough that one of the farmers has put three sons through college on less than 25 acres of mostly jujubes (Chinese dates) and daikon.
A lot of this produce is so exotic that you probably won’t find it at your local supermarket or chain restaurant today, but who knows what tomorrow might bring? Baby bok choy and daikon, which are everywhere today, were considered exotic only five years ago. Can Chinese broccoli, yard-long beans and fuzzy melon be far behind? The mainstream demand for these ingredients started with adventurous chefs looking for new things to play with, but many of them have been picked up by chain restaurants such as Applebee’s and Bennigan’s as they flirt with Americans’ taste for Asian food. This quiet introduction of new ingredients is guerrilla marketing at its best. The specialty produce distributor Frieda’s, which introduced America to the kiwifruit, now has a list of more than thirty Asian vegetables, including arrowroot and yu choy sum, a kind of flowering, mustardy green.
Mainstream acceptance is the Laotians’ dream for tomorrow. For now, bouncing around Fresno in his dusty 1983 Toyota, the air conditioner straining against the 106-degree heat, Yang is focused on the present and helping other Laotians attain the success he enjoys. After more than twenty years in this country, he says he has finally stopped having nightmares about the jungle and his family’s exodus. He turns down a dirt road between brand-new residential developments and stops beside a verdant plot, not more than an acre and a half. At the far end are fat stalks of sugarcane, elephant ear leaves of taro and what looks like tall grass. That grass is rice, a specially prized variety traditionally grown in the Laotian highlands. In another month it will be harvested and sold for a very good price at one of the farmers’ markets, or to a restaurant. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll even be able to buy it at your neighborhood grocery. But now it sits baking in the Fresno sun, giving off a heavenly aroma that smells to an outsider like the very best basmati. For a Hmong farmer, the fragrance is like the past and the future combined. Yang stands at the edge of the field, closes his eyes and breathes in, deeply, over and over again.