US: Farmers Market Legal Toolkit gets update

Since the fall of 2014, FMC Senior Researcher Darlene Wolnik and Executive Director Jen Cheek have been collaborating with Erin Buckwalter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) to assist the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at the Vermont Law School on a national farmers market legal toolkit.

This four year project, funded through the USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), is meant to help navigate some of the complex legal issues involved in starting and running farmers markets. The project focuses on three key areas: governance/business structure (researched in Year 1), EBT/SNAP issues ( Year 2), and general liability & risk management (underway in 2016).

The ensuing resources will be organized on a new website hosted by CAFS, scheduled to be live by the end of 2017. The toolkit will offer a cross section of resources that should mitigate the risks of operating a market through detailed research papers, examples of appropriate language for documents, downloadable checklists, and case studies of markets from around the country.

With the assistance of the FMC and NOFA-VT project team, law students under the direction of Jamie Renner, Assistant Professor of Law and Supervisor of the CAFS Food & Agriculture Clinic have done successive rounds of interviews with dozens of market leaders to uncover the most pressing issues markets currently face. Many of the market organizations interviewed have since offered their templates or redacted documents to be added to the Legal Toolkit.

Read more at the Farmers Market Coalition