How To *Actually* Talk To Your Farmer

Some basic conversation advice

“How to Talk to Your Farmer” is a hilariously bad google search. It makes perfect sense to me why I never overhear quality conversations when I’m walking through one of our farmers markets. A fruitful dialogue with your farmer does take a little bit of thought and preparation, but many of the questions that stem from that search term are, frankly, inane. Most of the questions (like “Do you use chemical fertilizers?”) are designed to find reasons to disqualify a farmer from your food dollar. The thing is, every vendor at the market knows exactly how to spin the answers to placate any sense of curiosity without revealing any rough edges about their business or anything like that. It turns out you can’t ask stock questions and expect insightful answers. You’re going to get out of this what you put into it.

So let’s get one thing straight: you’re (probably) not an investigative journalist, and you’re definitely not going to get your “gotcha” moment by asking the farmer about his growing practices, his relationship with immigrant labor, or whatever else. If you want to actually get to know your farmer, you need to start from a position of trust. The goal here is to build a lasting relationship and suspicion makes a terrible foundation. We can talk about bad actors in the farmers market at some point, but if you’re intrigued by this piece, you probably don’t need to think about that stuff yet. Your goal for now is to simply form organic connections with your farmers and have them impart a little bit of knowledge to you. So let’s get to work on that.

To start, let’s discuss the range of characters you might meet on the other side of the produce table. The person you’re about to have a conversation with could be the head of a farm that has dozens of employees and does high-seven figures of annual business, or it could be someone’s cousin who helps out with the booth once a week and goes to nursing school, rarely stepping foot on the farm. He could be a farm worker who got tapped for this job because he knows how to drive the big truck and can handle doing quick math, or a hobbyist backyard “farmer” who lives in the city a few blocks away and has a few fruit trees and free Saturday mornings. She could be someone from a town near the farm with a bubbly personality, hired specifically to just do sales, or a fourth generation farm daughter who grew up in the fields and is wrestling with whether or not she’s crazy enough to take over the constantly-near-failing family farm one day. The farm business they are representing could own their land, they could rent their land, they could be multi-generational, they could be just starting out, they could be well-funded (okay, that one is pretty rare), they could be operating on a shoestring. “Farmer” is arguably the vaguest term for an occupation in the English language, and you’d do well to add a little context and get to know the person handing you that produce.

With that said, there’s no need to overthink this. Let’s start with some easy small talk!

• Hi, what’s your name? 

• Nice to meet you, ___, is it cool if I ask you a couple questions about the farm?

• Is it your farm? Do you work on it? What kind of work do you do for the farm?

I swear, if I could just remind everyone who walks into a farmers market that this is how you start a conversation, I’ll have done more for American Food Culture than 99% of nutrition blogs and vlogs combined.

Okay. Now that we’ve made our introductions to our farmer, I’d like to remind you that your goal is to stay curious. I’m gonna give you a bunch of other questions to ask, but the best questions are going to be the ones that pop up in your head organically. And don’t be afraid to ask questions that seem stupid or ignorant to you… the fact that you’re reading this article automatically means you put more thought into this than at least half the folks showing up at the farmers market.

So let’s get to the good stuff. Let’s talk about the products.

• What are your favorite things to eat from the farm? How do you like to prepare them?

• Is there anything at peak of season right now? What are people raving about?

• Any tips on picking out the perfect _____? How do I best store this and how long will it keep? 

If you’ve never Talked To Your Farmer before, the questions above are all you need. All that stuff in your head about wanting to find farmers who share your ethics and values and making sure that you “vote with your dollar” properly… that can wait for now. I agree it’s important, but it’s not as important as just making a human connection with someone who has a say about the food you’re about to purchase, bring into your home, and put into your body. We’ll get to the values part, but let’s deepen our appreciation of our food first. This gratitude that you’re cultivating will be the fuel that propels you forward in your food journey.

Warning: the rest of this piece is pretty nerdy. I’m going to get into some deeper conversations you might want to have with your farmer, but everything below is strictly optional. I derive A LOT of value from being able to connect stories and faces and community to my food, and the following questions help me tell a richer, more nuanced story to myself. But you shouldn’t feel compelled to wrestle with this kind of stuff until you’ve taken those important first steps. 

So, I really have to get something off my chest before we move any further. 

Food is fucking complicated.

Farming is fucking complicated.

There is no magical farmer who is doing everything right and checking all the boxes. You will never meet the farmer who has perfect land management skills, is paying wages commensurate with the skill and effort farm workers put into their craft, doing their part to keep water usage at a sustainable level, politically oriented to right the wrongs of agriculture’s past and present, turning a profit, AND selling food at a premium-but-not-too-premium price that feels fair, or at least reasonable, to conscientious foodie types. Our broken-ass food system just won’t allow for that fictional farm to exist. Every farmer is compromising something. 

I’ve done a lot of reading about the myriad angles of farming, and I’ve literally spent 10,000 hours at farmers markets in the last decade, and I still don’t feel like I could Barbara Walters my way into getting someone to admit their farm is pulling some shady nonsense. Unless you’re up for doing endless hours of research on all these facets and then following through by making farm visits and interviewing employees and neighbors, the best you can do is make your best guess on who is trying their hardest to make good with all the stakeholders involved: employees, customers, neighbors, the environment, other farmers, and also themselves. Again, it’s almost certainly better to stay focused on the positive elements of the farm that you can identify. 

With that said, here’s how I choose my farmers.¹ 

• More than finding any farm with the “right” answers, I’m looking for farmers with passion, empathy, and cleverness. 

• A passionate farmer’s eyes light up when you ask deeper questions about their farm. They’ve already thought about those questions on their own and they appreciate the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions on the topic with someone willing to listen. 

• An empathic farmer cares about the people working on his farm, including himself and his family. My kind of farmer will share a couple unique things that they try to do to make their workers’ lives better, while still admitting they wish they could do more for their people: customers, employees, family, etc.

• A clever farmer understands his farm is a business and enjoys solving problems to make the business run more smoothly. They don’t just do things because “that’s the way we’ve always done them”. Instead, they’re constantly thinking about how to do things better. Their minds are engaged.

• I know this might sound a little controversial, but I want to add one more thing: I don’t gravitate toward farmers who identify as victims. I’ve met a lot of farmers who like to complain about how the deck is always stacked against them, whether the transgressions are coming from local politicians, corporate AgTech conglomerates, federal policy, or God himself through unjust weather practices. To be honest, most of them are not wrong. It is pretty hard to be a small farmer these days. But my theory is most people who think they’re living underneath someone’s boot are going to be mostly focused on getting what they feel they deserve, which justifies cutting corners and taking shortcuts to get it. 

In a word, when I’m Talking To My Farmer, I’m scanning for enthusiasm. Anyone who gets excited to talk about their farm, their successes and their failures, their challenges and opportunities… those are the kind of people I want growing my food. Those are the people that are going to help make me feel connected.

Some of the questions I like to ask my farmers can feel a little bit like a job interview. There’s a reason for that: if we can get off script a little bit, we can go beyond the surface-level and start discussing values. When it comes to values, I tend to think in terms of three broad categories: how Your Farmer administers to their land, to their people (employees, family, themselves), and to the political sphere.² 

I’m going to give some example questions, but hopefully they’ll inspire you to come up with some of your own:

• How is your growing season going? What does the recent [wet/dry/cold/hot] spell mean for your farm? Have you had any pests or weeds? How are you handling it?

• What’s been the most challenging thing to grow this year? How are you solving that problem?

• What are you doing differently from other farms?

• What are your biggest concerns or headaches these days? 

• Do you see the farm growing in the future? What would that look like? What do you hope for the future of your farm?

• Are you involved with your local farm bureau? Do you go to any county meetings? Do you have any pet political projects (note: I honestly never proactively ask questions like this, political discussion will usually come up organically… I’ve never met a farmer without political opinions)

And hold onto these ones for the farm employees:

• Have you worked on other farms before? How is this one different?

• How long have you worked on this farm?

• Do you want to stay in agriculture? Do you want your own farm someday?

Again, we don’t need to be too preoccupied with the specific answers these farmers give. We need only to observe where these conversations lead — ideally toward farmers who think hard about these topics and appear to be doing their earnest best. There’s a lot of nuance to every aspect of farming, and I’m not going to pretend I know better than them because I read a lot of books.³ People with similar goals can have different ideas about how to achieve them. Always best to keep that in mind and stay attached to the process.

____

[cut to: Me in a field, sauntering up to a fence post. A soft, twangy, acoustic western guitar riff is playing in the background. I lean my elbow on the fence post, set my jaw and gaze smoothly into the camera]

I hope you found this piece helpful and informative. The farmers market can be an overwhelming place, and the promise of what it can offer isn’t always obvious on the surface. But with the right mindset and little preparation, you, too, can truly (flip to camera 2) Get To Know Your Farmer. 

[Relaxing, I put on my warmest half-grin]

So I’ll see *you* next weekend at the farmers market.

1. You can feel free to use this framework yourself or come up with your own. This framework works for me but I can certainly appreciate other lines of reasoning

2. I have my opinions on best practices for all of these categories, but they’re loosely held opinions and I don’t want to distract by expressing them. Like I said, this stuff is complicated.

3. There are a lot parallels to childless folks telling a mom or dad how to best parent their kid