For the first time in 2018, both Lafayette and West Lafayette accepted Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits – commonly known as food stamps – at their farmer’s markets. SNAP can take time to catch on at a market, especially in year one, so more work still lies ahead to make both programs a success.
At Lafayette’s pre-Thanksgiving market, Daniel Fagerstrom of Fairstream Farms is listing all the different ways to prepare a Jerusalem artichoke.
“You can also grate them onto salads, if you want to use them fresh…so that’s another way to use them,” Fagerstrom says. “You can pan-fry them. Boil them like a potato, add a little butter or salt-and-pepper.”
Fagerstrom has been a vendor at the Lafayette market for about eight years. He agreed to accept SNAP benefits this season, but says few customers at his booth asked to use them. He’s hopeful teaching people how to use the available fruits and vegetables is one way to encourage more business, by all customers.
“I think a cooking class with a local chef that wants to get his name known, and let him work with the local produce, and make dishes ready to go,” Fagerstrom says.
Halfway down the block, Alice Kelso of Mount Gilboa Farms thumbs through a stack of wooden SNAP tokens in her cash box, redeemed by a customer just that morning.
“It’s been wonderful,” Kelso says. “I mean…I think it needs a little more time for folks to get accustomed to the fact that they’re there.”
Challenges to participation
Lafayette’s market coordinator, Emily Colombo, says there were 29 SNAP transactions, totaling $484, this past season. She says that number is on par with her expectations after conversations with her peers at other markets.
“But what made me happy about it, or what I felt good about it—I want to say we had three or four regulars that came back multiple times,” Colombo says.
But even Colombo admits word of mouth hasn’t reached the bigger pool of SNAP users. She distributed informational flyers to agencies with more direct access to those populations, like the Tippecanoe County Health Department and Food Finders Food Bank, but says she can’t be sure how much impact that actually had. Colombo also worked with the Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, office to coordinate text messages to SNAP users, reminding them they could use their benefits at the market. She also acknowledges the need to create closer personal relationships with those organizations, and their members.
“Volunteers are key for something like this, because I can’t be in three places at once—sit at a booth all day and run the market,” Colombo says.
Multiple social service agencies with an interest in getting the program up and running repeatedly reached out to Colombo prior to the launch of the program, but she says she had limited success attracting help to run the SNAP table. It’s a divide she’ll have to bridge before next season.
One plan Colombo isn’t sure about? Whether on-the-ground educational programming, such as cooking demonstrations, would help draw more customers to the market.
“So it kind of becomes, I guess, a chicken and an egg issue,” Colombo says. “Do we want to take space away from vendors to focus on that? Or do we want to grow the market to have more vendors, and more space to sell the product.”
West Lafayette market officially starts SNAP acceptance
A few days later, at West Lafayette’s end-of-season market, coordinator Julia Zuchkov stands at a round, umbrella-topped table, teaching volunteer Annette Britton how to operate the brand new machine that allows SNAP users to run their electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards and receive the wooden tokens they’ll offer vendors for their goods.
“You do the transaction for five dollars, you’ll give them five tokens,” Zuchkov says.
While this was the first day SNAP benefits could be redeemed at the West Lafayette market in 2018, it was also the last, until next year. West Lafayette only started the process of applying to offer SNAP benefits at the market this summer, after WBAA had begun reporting on the fact neither local market allowed visitors to use SNAP.
West Lafayette faces the same challenge Lafayette does: how to get SNAP users to the market. Zuchkov is also depending on word of mouth.
“It was a lot of just talking to people and letting people know what was going on, but most of it I’m hoping to hit harder…next season,” Zuchkov says.
There were no SNAP transactions at the West Lafayette market that day. How many both markets record next year will depend largely on how well they advertise and accessorize.
