· Open in October from 9 am to noon
· Location: First National Bank of Durango parking lot
· Regular season ends Oct. 29th
· Thanksgiving market on Nov. 19th at fairgrounds
· Holiday market on Dec.10th at fairgrounds
Durango’s Farmers Market provides an opportunity for Fort Lewis College students to ease into Saturday morning. Supplying a unique environment with live music, shopping, and socialization opportunities with locals.
The farmers market has all locally produced fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, breads and granolas, Cody Reinheimer, manager of the farmers market, said.
They also offer hot coffee, juice, and ready to eat meals such as tacos, using local ingredients, Reinheimer said.
Every Saturday also features live music for the community to enjoy, he said.
“The farmers market is the kind of place where you might run into someone you know and be able to chat and socialize or maybe even make a new friend,” he said.
History of the Market
Twenty years ago, Carol Clark, a local event organizer, started the first Durango Farmers Market in the Chapman Hill parking lot with just a handful of vendors, Reinheimer said.
Clark was a senior at Fort Lewis College when she decided to organize a farmers market for her senior project, Reinheimer said.
For a couple of years, the Durango Farmers Market was held at Chapman Hill, until it moved to the Smiley Building in 1998, before landing in its current location in the year 2000, he said..
“The farmers market positively affects the community by providing delicious and nutritious local food, a place for people to meet and socialize and a venue for local businesses to succeed,” Reinheimer said.
Accessibility
EBT cards, which hold money given through food stamps, have always been accepted at the Durango Farmers Market, Reinheimer said.
In July, the farmers market joined with many other farmers’ markets in the Fair Food Network’s nationwide program, the Double Up Food Bucks, meaning the market will double the amount the card is swiped for, he said.
This new program helps increase accessibility to the produce for lower income families, he said.
“It is a pretty phenomenal way to empower those who otherwise may not be able to afford fresh food,” Reinheimer said.
While the farmers market joins Double Up Food Bucks for the season, it also started supporting and donating produce to the Manna Market, he said.
This year the garden project partnered with Manna Soup Kitchen on creating the Manna Market, which is now a free produce stand on Wednesday evenings at Manna, Sandhya Tillotson, executive director of the Garden Projects of Southwest Colorado, said. The season for the market ends on Oct. 5.
Every week the farmers at the Durango Farmers Market donate produce to the Manna Garden project, she said.
“It is providing fresh healthy affordable produce to the folks in our community who really need it the most,” Tillotson said. “It is also ensuring that produce is not going to waste.”
Jason Cloudt, the volunteer coordinator of the Manna Soup Kitchen, goes around to all the different farmer booths and collects the extra produce that did not sell at the market to donate rather than having it go to waste, Tillotson said.
After being collected from the market, the produce goes to the Manna Soup Kitchen for the Manna Market, she said.
While a large portion of the food collected goes to the Manna Market, the soup kitchen is also using some of the produce donated for meals throughout the week, Tillotson said.
This year the Manna Market has reached 693 adults and children as of Monday, Sept. 26, she said.
They distributed over 4,250 pounds of food from local farms through the Manna Market
and grew 920 pounds of food at the Manna Garden, Tillotson said.
“One gap that we see in this whole system is that we have more people needing the food and not enough food to go around,” she said.
In the future, the Manna Market is hoping to partner with the FLC Environmental Center next year to have students go out to farms and harvest extra produce for the Manna Market, Tillotson said.
Partnering together, Manna Market and students at FLC will hopefully be able to provide fresh produce to more families and people, she said.
Other farmers markets around Durango:
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