Why shop your Atchison Farmers Market? Come join us on Opening Day and find out! Celebrate our 20th Year on Opening Day, Saturday, May 19 (8AM to Noon)!
1. Connect with Your Community
1. Connect with Your Community
Visiting your friends at the Atchison Farmers Market makes shopping a pleasure rather than a chore. The farmers market is a community hub—a place to meet up with your friends, bring your children, or just get a taste of small-town life. Wouldn’t you rather stroll amidst outdoor stalls of fresh produce on a sunny day than roll your cart around a grocery store with artificial lights and piped in music?
2. Taste Real Flavors
2. Taste Real Flavors
Atchison Farmers Market fruits and vegetables are the freshest and tastiest available. Fruits are allowed to ripen fully in the field and are brought directly to you—no long-distance shipping and no gassing to simulate the ripening process. This food is fresh from the farm!
3. Enjoy the Season
3. Enjoy the Season
Shopping and cooking from the farmers market helps you to reconnect with the cycles of nature in our region. As you look forward to asparagus in spring, savor sweet corn in summer, or bake pumpkins in autumn, you reconnect with the earth, the weather, and the turning of the year.
4. Learn Cooking Tips, Recipes, and Meal Ideas
4. Learn Cooking Tips, Recipes, and Meal Ideas
The farmers, ranchers, and artisans at the Atchison Farmers Market are often passionate cooks with plenty of free advice about how to cook the foods they are selling. You can also attend any of our scheduled free seasonal cooking demonstrations. See the Events Tab at AtchisonFarmers.Market.
5. Nourish Yourself
5. Nourish Yourself
Most food found at the Atchison Farmers Market is minimally processed, and many of our farmers go to great lengths to grow the most nutritious produce possible by using sustainable techniques, picking produce right before the market, and growing heirloom varieties. In contrast, much food found in grocery stores is highly processed and grown using pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic modification. Some of it has been irradiated, waxed, or gassed in transit. These practices may have negative effects on human health.
6. Support Family Farmers
6. Support Family Farmers
Family farmers need your support, now that large agribusiness dominates food production in the U.S. Buying directly from farmers gives them a better return for their produce and gives them a fighting chance in today’s globalized economy.
7. Protect the Environment
7. Protect the Environment
Food at the Atchison Farmers Market is transported from with Atchison and surrounding counties, and is generally grown using methods that minimize the i
mpact on the earth. Industrially produced food in the U.S. travels an average of 1,500 miles to get to your plate, which contributes to pollution, and creates trash with extra packaging. Conventional agriculture also uses many more resources than sustainable agriculture and pollutes water, land, and air with toxic agricultural by-products.
8. Discover the Spice of Life: Variety
8. Discover the Spice of Life: Variety
At the Atchison Farmers Market you find an amazing array of produce that you don’t see in your average supermarket: red carrots, a rainbow of heirloom tomatoes, etc. It is a wonderful opportunity to savor the biodiversity of our planet.
9. Promote Humane Treatment of Animals
9. Promote Humane Treatment of Animals
At the Atchison Farmers Market, you can find meats and eggs from animals that have been raised without hormones or antibiotics, or that have grazed on green grass and eaten natural diets, or that have been spared the cramped and unnatural living conditions of feedlots and cages that are typical of animal agriculture.
10. Know Where Your Food Comes From
10. Know Where Your Food Comes From
A regular trip to the Atchison Farmers Market is one of the best ways to connect with where your food comes from. Meeting and talking to farmers and food artisans is a great opportunity to learn more about how and where food is produced.
Adapted from original CUESA article: https://cuesa.org/learn/10-reasons-support-farmers-markets
