New Market Shows What It Takes (Growing for Market)
This article was published in Growing for Market, a national trade magazine for market farmers, on November 1, 2003.
Above: the article as it appears on Growing for Market’s website. The full text is for subscribers only. Click to enlarge.
The magazine held up the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market, then four years old, as an example of how a producer-only market can help local farms and a struggling downtown, serving as an incubator for new businesses and drawing people and dollars back to the riverfront. It traces the market’s start: a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor and Tracy Frisch of the Regional Farm and Food Project formed a task force, RPI students scouted 25 possible sites, and the market opened in a Troy Marina parking lot in mid-May 2000 with 20 vendors.
Note: Growing for Market credits an RPI professor with the idea for the market. The Record’s coverage at the time, including a June 20, 2001 story, identified market president Matthew Lindstrom as an assistant professor at Siena College. The “Troy Marina parking lot” mentioned here is the Hedley Park Place lot.
The article is candid about the rough start. The first year drew only 100 to 350 shoppers a day, and Frisch recalls a cold season when customers “didn’t see anything but green stuff, and were disappointed,” and at least two vendors dropped out. By the second year, 35 vendors had signed up and crowds grew to an average of 500 to 700. The article promises lessons for other communities on what it takes to make a new market succeed; the rest of the piece is behind the magazine’s subscriber paywall.
“The farmers’ market has definitely put Troy back on the map.”
— Amy Halloran, the market’s special events manager, to Growing for Market
Read the full article at Growing for Market (subscription required).