National Farmers Market Week 2025: Celebrating Farmers Markets as Community Hubs
What comes to mind when you think of “farmers markets?” Ripe seasonal produce, colorful flowers, freshly baked bread, and music? While local farmers markets can have a direct positive impact on your weekend morning, they also make a huge impact on our broader community and local food system. In fact, farmers markets’ role in building healthy communities and prosperity for farmers and small businesses has made the USDA proclaim the first week of August, National Farmers Market Week! For the last 26 years, we’ve celebrated Farmers Markets at the peak of summer. This year on August 3-9th, join markets across North Carolina and the country in celebration, coordinated by the Farmers Market Coalition.
Why do we need a week to celebrate farmers markets? Farmers markets support North Carolina’s small and diversified farms and circulate money back into our local economy. In North Carolina, farmers markets generate an estimated $78.7 million in sales for small businesses. An estimated 9,056 small businesses sell at farmers markets in our state. These estimates come from a recent estimate conducted by the North Carolina Farmers Market Network (NCMFN) and NC State Extension.
Through the uncertainty and isolation of the last few years, farmers markets have served as a vital source of community connection and stability, offering fresh food and outdoor spaces to gather when many shelves in stores were bare. While farmers markets have always been essential to our local food systems, in this moment of widespread changes, we want to recognize the ways in which farmers markets are also essential tools for shaping our worlds. Farmers markets are designed in partnership with the people they serve, creating a space where market operators, farmers, shoppers, and neighbors can collaborate to meet the evolving needs of our communities. More than ever, we need places where people can come together.
This National Farmers Market Week, be sure to come out and visit a market in your area August 3-9 (and any date after!).
To learn more about farmers markets in your area, visit your local Extension Office. To promote farmers markets in your area, feel free to use resources in the NCFMN National Farmers Market Week Toolkit.
*This blog post was created using National Farmers Market Week promotion materials from the Farmers Market Coalition.
By: Hannah Dankbar, Local Food Program Manager, NC State Extension, NC State University
