A victim of its own success?

IS progress taking the farmers out of farmers markets? And is that a bad thing?

In Northern California, a prominent farmer announced on his blog last week that he is quitting San Francisco's landmark Ferry Plaza farmers market.

The day before, one of the most important figures in Southern California markets surprised an audience at a panel discussion by predicting that in the not-too-distant future, we won't have farmers markets as we now know them.

"As a business model, farmers markets couldn't be more inefficient," says Howell Tumlin, executive director of the Southland Farmers' Market Assn.

Farmers markets have changed American agriculture dramatically, even to the point that many ideas that once seemed radical now are accepted by even mainstream growers and supermarkets. But at the same time, this success has brought growing pains.

What made sense when markets were few and far between doesn't work nearly as well today, when there are almost 100 in Southern California alone.

This explosive growth has been a boon for small family farmers and for their customers, who now have easy access to high-quality fruits and vegetables. But it raises the question that if farmers are kept busy going to all those markets, when do they find time to grow anything?

That goes to the heart of Tumlin's concerns about the markets' future. Though he recognizes that the face-to-face interaction with farmers is one of the benefits that draws customers to the market, he points out that this luxury comes at a high price. It's like a chef having to stop cooking in order to hand-deliver every plate.

"I don't think people realize that literally someone left their farm and spent a whole day driving in to be able to sell to them," he says. "Wouldn't that time be better spent working in the fields?"

It wasn't so bad when each farmer went to only one or two markets a week. But now, when many of them are hitting seven or eight or even more, that inefficiency can become crippling.

The prospect of a farmer-less farmers market may cause dismay, but it's already happening. Except at the biggest and most popular markets, the majority of the people working the stands are not the farmers themselves but employees (granted, some of them seem to know every bit as much about their products as their bosses).

But even as farmers markets change, that doesn't mean we're heading back to the old industrial-style agriculture. The fact is, there are at least three possible alternatives to the current system that are already being explored.