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The purpose of the research was to extend on previous research by studying latent consumers’ attitude to farmers’ markets. Findings will be used to improve the marketing and publicity of farmers’ markets in order to attract other consumers groups. The people surveyed were not always aware of the term farmers’ market. Some think it is a place where farmers go to buy what they need. Around 94 per cent of people who have already been to a farmers’ market will return because they enjoy the food which is fresh, different, local, etc. and to support farmers. Latent consumers think that farmers’ markets sell fresh, quality, locally produced, tastier, healthier and seasonal food. However they do not expect the food to be cheaper. The most important criteria are quality, freshness and the fact that food is produced locally. Latent consumers would enjoy supporting local producers, information about the products and how to prepare them.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way one farmers’ market organization used an e-newsletter to establish and maintain their brand image as a socially responsible local food outlet. This research analyzed managerial communication efforts to promote farmers’ market products through email marketing. This analysis also revealed the positive and negative brand images that the e-newsletter communicates and how those align or fail to align with public opinion about of farmers’ markets.

The author spent 2.5 years participating in the farmers’ market organization that comprises the focus of this study, and this included conducting multiple studies using interview, survey and ethnographic methods. The data set for the present study includes two years’ worth of marketing messages from the e-newsletter campaign, which included 31 e-newsletters. Thematic analysis (Terry et al., 2017) was used to discover the dominant messages and values present. Analysis extended to textual messages, images, timing, design and overall newsletter content.

The results show that the digital communications at the Lawrence Farmers’ Market (LFM) promoted messages of getting to know your local farmer, eating fresh and healthy food and supporting local products. Additionally, the market frequently attempted to make the market accessible by communicating operating days and times. Finally, the newsletter message analysis also revealed that the LFM brand could be characterized as lacking consistency, having poor organization, and using poor design principles.

This research extends the knowledge of how farmers’ market organizations engage in brand image management. While there are scores of studies on consumer preferences, we have very few that analyze the ways farmers' market organizations spread key brand ideas to consumers. Additionally, this research offers other implications for nonprofits, looking to improve their brand image with limited resources.

Despite the availability of new buyers and the possibility to receive higher prices, still large numbers of smallholder farmers do not participate in the modern supply chains. This study aims to understand the factors that affect smallholder farmers' participation in a newly emerging modern supply chain context.

Data were collected from 6 focus groups of farmers (67 farmers in total) and 14 interviews with market actors and key informants such as government officials and donor organisations.

Influential factors of farmers' participation in the modern chain include buyer attributes and transaction conditions. High prices and prompt payment are the key motivators, with the main inhibitors being personal relationships with buyers and strict market requirements related to quality and quantity supplied.

In order to encourage smallholder farmer participation in modern chains, an expansion of the marketing of high-quality vegetables by implementing quality control mechanisms and the encouragement to adopt safe marketing practices is needed. These results are particularly relevant for practitioners and policymakers.

Most research to date concentrates on farmers' socioeconomic characteristics and are based in countries with advanced modern chains, and rarely focus on farmer participation in countries where modern chains are relatively new. This study addresses this gap by analysing farmer preferences to engage in the context of a country experiencing the emergence of trade through modern vegetable supply chain system.

Farmers markets act as a nexus between farmers, community members and social values, and can foster significant community and environmental benefits. However, some of these benefits, including agricultural sustainability, are rarely measured or publicized, restricting the full potential of markets and their associated actors to generate public benefits. This study aims to consider how markets, planners and policymakers might address this gap to promote a healthy environment and climate change mitigation.

In this article, the authors discuss their efforts to advance the above opportunity by developing, in collaboration with 20 farms across the USA, a citizen science data collection tool that measures and translates farm “ecosystem services” into accessible, public-facing formats to support informed farmer and consumer decision-making.

The authors present takeaways from exploratory interviews with three farmer-collaborators, which illustrate how tools like ours can help farmers in myriad ways: setting benchmarks to measure on-farm improvement over time, legitimizing their work through scientific grounding, communicating environmental impacts to public audiences, increasing sales to fund sustainability efforts, gaining competitive edge and others.

More broadly, the article exemplifies how marketplaces can strengthen symbiotic linkages between individuals, community allies and social goals through data measurement and communication, and reflects on how planners and policymakers might support these connections to advance public purposes.

This research responds uniquely to a critical need identified by practitioners and academics to expand understanding and awareness of the ecosystem services farms provide.

This paper aims to report results from an exploratory study of farmers' markets, taking particular interest in the motives for participation of customers, and their perceptions of the functioning of markets as co‐created sites of local food production, retail and consumption. Customer perceptions are also compared between farmers' markets and supermarkets.

Questionnaires were completed by 252 customers at 11 farmers' markets around New Zealand in 2008‐2009. Customers rated the importance of 31 constructs that might influence their involvement. For comparison, 257 supermarket shoppers in Auckland completed a similar questionnaire. Student t‐tests are used to distinguish between samples and subsample groups.

The paper finds that product quality is the key motivator for patronage, with price not a significant barrier to purchase or visits to farmers' markets. The “retail environment” has only a modest influence on market customer choices, and markets are only partially co‐created, with customers not highly valuing interaction with producers. Customers rated price, location and store environment constructs to be much more important at supermarkets than at markets.

Farmers' markets have experienced recent rapid growth and diffusion in many parts of the world, including Australasia, becoming popular sites of small retail trade and local cultural exchange. This paper contributes to the understanding of what motivates customers to participate in them, and what distinguishes markets from other food retailing sites such as supermarkets, at least in the New Zealand context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of transactional costs on smallholder avocado farmers’ participation in the export market and the extent of participation in Murang’a County, Kenya.

Data was collected from 384 avocado farmers in Murang’a County, following stratified sampling. The Heckman two-stage model was used for analysis.

Results showed that the cost of information search was an important variable that impedes smallholders’ participation in export marketing while harvesting costs inhibits the extent of participation in export marketing.

This study used data at the farm level. Therefore, insights on transaction costs among other marketing agents in the export market value chain would be an issue for future studies.

Following the debate on transaction costs and market participation among farmers in Sub-Sahara Africa, this paper models transactional costs and export market participation among avocado smallholders and measures the extent of participation with the inclusion of harvesting costs, negotiation costs, monitoring costs and information search costs that are not common in previous studies, thus contributing to the development of literature.

Farmers' markets are often identified as the roots of marketing enterprise. They are usually considered as part of a traditional economy. This study seeks to examine how the social and political context shaped the appearance, growth, decline, and reappearance of farmers' markets in Canada. It aims to demonstrate the continuation and resilience of this industry.

Published research and historical documents of Canadian farmers' markets were used to derive a periodization of events based on events and turning points to allow an understanding of the factors affecting business success.

This study finds three eras of farmers' markets in Canada that were shaped by the social and political environment. In the first era, between 1800 and 1915, immigrants brought their conception of farmers' markets from Europe to the early settlements of the “new world.” In the second era between 1916 and 1970, as people moved west they became more self‐sufficient. Life became modernized and farming became more industrial. People shifted from their reliance on farmers' markets to more general mercantile stores and then to modern supermarkets. In the third era, starting in the 1970s, farmers' markets came into resurgence, largely as a result of a growing interest in the environment and local foods. They are currently, however, mostly relegated to a niche role in the modern food supply.

This study shows how the success of a particular commercial enterprise, in this case farmers' markets, is shaped by and reacts to larger forces in the business environment.

The authors examine issues related to farm‐to‐table direct marketing. We consider motivations and drawbacks associated with participating in farm‐to‐table from both the consumer and farmer perspectives. While we find a significant amount of advocacy for the restoration of nostalgic methods of food distribution that remove all intermediaries from direct farmer‐consumer interaction, we conclude that farm‐to‐table direct marketing plays, and is likely to continue to play, a very minor role in US food distribution.

This paper examines the impact of the Covid-19 induced lockdown on selected vegetables to confirm if the vegetable supply chain was disrupted during that period. It attempts to see if direct marketing via FPOs/FPCs helped Indian farmers to cope with adverse situations aroused in vegetable marketing.

This study opted for mixed methods research. First, a granular data set comprising daily observation on wholesale price and the market arrival of vegetables were analysed. Descriptive statistics and Kalmogorov-Smirnov test were used to understand the severity of disruptions in the vegetable supply chain in India during the lockdown. Then, qualitative information from different stakeholders engaged in the vegetable marketing was collected through a phone survey and assessed using content analysis to comprehend how FPOs have helped farmer’s during this crisis.

This paper confirms disruptions in the vegetable supply chain. Quantities of chosen vegetables arriving in the mandis were significantly lower than in the previous year for all phases of lockdown. Consequently, prices were much higher than in 2019–2020 for both the lockdown and subsequent phases unlock. Results further suggest that those farmers who are already in networks of FPOs/FPCs are able to get benefited. It was also observed that direct marketing through institutional supports is being more explored in the regions where FPOs/FPCs already exist.

Since it is an exploratory study involving a small sample, the research results may lack generalisability.

This study provides scope for direct marketing through FPOs/FPCs in improving the food supply chain.

The paper seeks to explore the importance of a sample of New Zealand farmers' markets in providing a supportive setting for the take‐off as well as the decline stage of the small business life cycle, with a view to identifying factors that may enhance rural small business survivability.

The task was achieved by use of a combination of interviews and case studies. A list of new generation farmers' markets was compiled. Managers from four of these markets were interviewed to identify the possible existence of businesses that had been fostered by, but had now outgrown, the market. Four incubated businesses were selected from one of the longer established markets. From a more recently established market, 18 stallholders were selected for examination of their attitudes towards the market as a nurturing environment in relation to the life‐cycle stage of the business. Data were analysed using qualitative techniques of theme identification and analysis.

It was found that farmers' markets can have a role as small business incubators and safety nets, thus enhancing the survival chances of rural small businesses. This may be particularly useful where dwindling government subsidies and growing supermarket power result in declining incomes and reduced outlets for small‐scale farmers and rural producers.

The research findings are limited by the non‐random nature of the sampling procedure. In such an exploratory study, the main emphasis was on establishing the existence of the incubator and safety net functions. Further research is needed to establish the extent of these roles.

The research investigates a relatively unique setting of an unsubsidised agricultural sector.