This website is for farmers markets seeking to begin or expand evaluation planning. On this page, we offer a history of how operators, researchers, and advocates have sought to evaluate markets, to test and support the narratives we hold about how and why farmers markets make a difference in communities.

More on this topic and the “eras” of farmers markets will be added to this space as market research continues.

1970s: New era and resurgence of farmers markets in the U.S. Farmers markets organize to connect family farms to the regional towns and cities they serve. The USDA’s Farmer-to-Consumer Direct Marketing Act of 1976 provides a major boost in this era.

1990s: researchers and sector advocates begins developing tools to formally evaluate market attributes: vendors, visitor, sales, programming, and impacts on local communities.

1998: Larry Lev, Linda Brewer, and Garry Stephenson, researchers from Oregon State University, develop the Tools for Rapid Market Assessment (RMA) which include three methods of data collection – attendance counts, dot surveys, and a method called Constructive Comments and Observations (CCO). The CCO method is designed to observe the physical characteristics of the market, vendors and products, and the market atmosphere. 

2002: The Economics Institute at Loyola University New Orleans (now Market Umbrella) develops an online tool for organizing and reporting data collected by markets called the Sticky Economic Evaluation Device (SEED). SEED applies an economic multiplier to raw data to create PDF reports detailing market statistics and overall economic impact.

Mid 2000s: The Market Umbrella team, led by Dr. Robin Moon, adds prototype measurement tools for assessing social cohesion in their trans•act fellowship project and drafts the first market  typology framework to assess different market types’ impacts. 

2010s: As the national support entity for farmers markets in the United States, Farmers Market Coalition responds to farmers market operators’ and market partners’ requests for evaluation resources and training. FMC also gathers and publishes data on the many positive impacts markets have on producers, host communities, agriculture, and on the larger civil society. 

2014: FMC collaborates with University of Wisconsin-Madison on Indicators for Impact: Farmers Markets as Leaders in Collaborative Food System Data Collection and Analysis, a 3-year research project funded by USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI).  The project’s goal was to identify data measures and collection tools and help markets and their partners integrate these into a long-term measurement strategy through training and technical assistance. Dr. Alfonso Morales was the Principal Investigator for the project. 

2014: FMC begins offering a subscription-based software called Farmers Market Metrics. This software was designed for market operators to be able to easily collect and store data to then immediately report via a selection of widget and summary templates designed by FMC. The new software adapts aspects of the approaches used in the RMA, SEED, and FM Tracks tools mentioned above, along with practices FMC already had in place. This will eventually be detailed in the paper Designing an effective, scalable data collection tool to measure farmers market impacts, in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development in December 2018. The Farmers Market Metrics software offered reports on the following:

2014: University of Wisconsin-Madison builds and offers a farmers-market data collection toolkit named Metrics + Indicators for Impact (MIFI), later rebranded as Farm2Facts. The toolkit offers visualization and analysis software for markets. 

2015: Case Western Reserve University, led by the work of Dr. Darcy Freedman, launches FM Tracks at the Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods (PRCHN). This is an application originally designed to help track data related to SNAP/EBT and nutrition incentive programming at markets, using shopper survey responses and SNAP transaction data to create a summary of program activity. Wholesome Wave supports PRCHN in initial dissemination of FM Tracks among 273 markets. 

2019: The “Market Clusters” resource FMC develops as part of the Strengthening Pittsburgh’s Farmers Markets report, which details analysis of Pittsburgh’s markets completed through a partnership between the City of Pittsburgh and FMC, illustrates the growing effort to create a standard around different market types. Market typology acknowledges there is a spectrum of design choices in open-air farmers markets, and that market operators often move between types over the lifespan of a market site. 

2019: Article “The Farmers Market Metrics Project: A research brief on scalable data collection in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro” (Peterson, H. H., & Nowak, J. J.) outlines a multi-stakeholder market-based measurement project in Minneapolis/St. Paul.  It is now known as FM360 and run out of the University of Minnesota. Many of the article’s findings mirror those in FMC’s JAFSCD article “Designing Effective, Scalable Data Collection Tools to Measure Farmers Market Impacts” (Wolnik, Cheek, Weaver. 2018). 

2020-2022: The “Local and Regional Food Systems Response to COVID” project, led by the USDA AMS team and its research partners at Colorado State University and University of Kentucky, gathers more than two dozen leaders from across the local food sector (including the Farmers Market Coalition) to understand how to build in more resilience to civic interruptions.The project results in a website of useful resources, and includes a new data mapping and visualization site (FAME) designed to assist those seeking funding through USDA’s LAMP grants. 

2021-2024: FMPP project Promoting Farmers Markets Impacts: Building Local and State Level Capacity for Data. FMC works toward unified and simplified language and a comprehensive set of resources around evaluation for farmers markets, including a new website and resource library dedicated solely to farmers market evaluation, to be launched in 2024.

2023: FMC announces it will sunset the Farmers market Metrics software in Spring of 2023 in order to focus its efforts to assist apps/computer programs with adding evaluation functionality. This year, more than half of FMC’s projects included work supporting market evaluation. 

2025: FMC launches a new website devoted to evaluation of farmers markets, with information and tools for planning, collecting, tracking, analyzing, and sharing market data. The site includes: a standardized Question Bank for use at farmers markets and across the sector, editable data collection tools based on the Question Bank, a library of FMCs go-to evaluation resources, “quick-start” tool for getting started with data collection and evaluation of your market, and full-length guides providing process tips, techniques, and examples for each step in the evaluation process.