Welcome back to the blog!

To catch up on what we’ve been up to in Weeks 1-3, check out blog post 1!

Whew! Time Flies! We are already approximately halfway through the term and project activities are quickly underway. In our last post, we spoke about our initial feelings of shock and uncertainty; however, we have now found direction with the completion of our proposal. Through talks and collaboration as a group and with Tara (our community partner), we have completed our proposal indicating the objectives and methods to achieve them.

Check out LFS 350 BAFMP Proposal to follow along!

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Our Weekly Objectives and Achievements to Date:

Week Four:

Objectives:

  • Discuss and prepare a proposal draft, section by section.
  • Complete data input by September 30th.

Achievements:

  • Prepared a rough draft/outline of the proposal in tutorial to be reviewed by TA, Wilson Mendes.
  • Completed data input September 27th.
  • Emailed our community partner an update on our project to date.

Week Five:

Objectives:

  • Refine proposal based on TA’s feedback.
  • Group visit to Burnaby Artisan Farmers’ Market – October 7th.
  • Observe and conduct in-person interviews with vendors along with customer counts.
  • Contact community partner to set up second meeting.

Achievements:

  • Finalized proposal report submitted October 8th.
  • Successful market visit with great on-site interviews, customer counts, and subjective research through food purchasing.
  • Contacted community partner to set up second meeting and received confirmation of date and time.

Week Six (Present Day):

Objectives:

  • Second meeting with community partner on October 11th focusing on finalizing email survey questions.
  • Begin drafting blog post 2.
  • Finalize and post blog post 2 by October 13th.

Achievements:

  • Met with community partner, Tara Immell – October 11th:

– Returned hard copy records

– Received comments on proposal

– Finalized the four main questions to be included in email survey

  • Drafted questions for survey.
  • Set up Triple Bottom Line Burnaby-specific email portal for distribution and collection of surveys.
  • Posted blog post 2 October 13th.
  •  On Saturday, Oct. 7, our team visited the Burnaby Artisan Farmers’  Market. We interviewed the farm vendors on site, as well the market manager for background information. We also conducted parking lot car counts, and customer counts using the Oregon University system.

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A Moment of Significance:

What:

With our Triple Bottom Line team’s first site visit at the Burnaby Artisan Farmers’ Market last week, we have learned a valuable lesson.

We have chosen to focus our project solely on the farm vendors, and their reasons for choosing to sell at the Burnaby Market, as well as why some have opted to leave. We determined not to include the artisans or prepared food vendors in this research project, as we felt that would have been too broad, and that we wouldn’t have had enough resources to achieve the goal.

Going in to this visit, we thought we would predominantly get responses of vendors wanting to sell at the larger Vancouver markets, and opting for Burnaby as a second choice. We came to this assumption because that is what the research told us. Through our research, we noted that because smaller markets have fewer vendors, they are more “vulnerable to descending quickly into a crisis by a drop in vendor numbers and thus, suffering the repercussions of a lack of products, fewer customers and low administrative revenue” (Stephensen, Lev & Brewer, 2007; Campbell, 2014).

However, that was not the case at all with the vendors we spoke with.

The vendors love their artisan farmers’ market!

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So What:

Every farm vendor we talked to told us Burnaby was their first choice. They loved the relational experience of this market. One farmer told us the rules of the Vancouver markets were too much to handle for his laid-back persona; another farmer told us that her sales were higher at the Burnaby market than at Trout Lake; another farmer said the availability of parking on-site was a huge draw.

The market manager told us the Burnaby market was a “grocery” style market whereby consumers fill their bags, take them back to their cars, which are located adjacent to the vendors, and come back for more. Transactions are mostly family-based and therefore, larger. “This is an asset”, he said.

There was one year where the market, which has predominantly been centrally located at Burnaby City Hall, relocated to Burnaby Village Museum. The set-up there was not as conducive to grocery-style shopping. Vendors had to haul their goods in and out quite a distance from the parking lot, and on rainy days, it was hard for the elderly consumers to navigate the field.

This was a learning curve in the early days of the artisan market, of which they have had a few. Still, 10 years in, they are most certainly the experts. We may have ideas, but they have experiential knowledge. That knowledge and input is fundamental to creating a successful partnership (Sirolli, 2012).

Team Triple Bottom Line – Burnaby getting the market rundown by Market Manager (and seafood vendor) Ron Gorman.

The responses from the farm vendors were both insightful and significant. While the Burnaby Market has experienced challenges in the last two years, and has lost some of its past farm vendors, according to those we chatted with, it’s not the nature of the market that’s the problem. Mind you, the vendors we chatted with were predominantly long-time vendors ranging from six to 10 years servicing this market. We are intending to chat with a relatively new vendor via phone in the coming week.

Comparatively, we did speak to a couple of prepared foods and artisan vendors in passing who mentioned that Burnaby was their second choice. They would have preferred the Vancouver markets because they were closer to where they live, and because they believed their sales would be stronger in those environments.

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Now What:

Ultimately, we enjoyed a successful visit at the market, but to improve our approach we would have benefitted from the advice of Ernesto Sirolli (2012), to go into the community without preconceived ideas. We needed to enter with an open mind and realize that we couldn’t generalize the research we read to encompass all farmers’ markets. By going into the community to hear from the vendors themselves, we were able to listen, observe, and experience the Burnaby Artisan Farmers’ Market firsthand. With a better understanding of the background on both the market and some of the vendors, we are now in a more suitable position to begin our surveys drawing on assets and limitations of the market that are of priority to vendors. With the engagement of the vendors along with that of the Artisan Farmers’ Market organization in developing our inquiry questions, we are able to better achieve our collective objectives and provide a recommendation.

Further, it will be interesting to learn the reasoning behind why those vendors who used to sell in Burnaby, have since opted not to.

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Upcoming Objectives and Achievement Strategies:

At the meeting with our project partner Tara Immell, we discussed the survey that we are to distribute to current and past vendors. A past vendor survey was developed in 2010 by the BC Association of Farmers’ Market. Given our timeframe and focus for the project, we have reduced the length of the survey, which will now include approximately 15 questions. We will be incorporating some of the questions from 2010 in addition to the questions that Tara has expressed are relevant to the organization at present.

We will be finalizing quite a few things within the next week:

  • Our email survey complete with confidentiality form for participants of the project.
  • Recipients of email survey from our list of approximately 26 farm vendors.
  • Arising from the inputed data, past farm vendors we would like to interview.

Surveys will be distributed by October 21st through a Triple Bottom Line Burnaby – specific email portal. Our aim is to get at least 15 response from both past and current farm vendors. Once we have collected the responses, we will begin to categorize them.

To put our words into actions our strategies are to share tasks to maximize efficiency, remind each other of due dates, and collaborate to ensure consistency.

Paramount to our many project activities is the continued respect and communication with Tara and within our group itself.

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In the meantime, we’re going to dabble in a little bit of subjective research – eating market fresh apples, peach-thyme scones, and colourful peppers galore!

References:

Campbell, J. (2014). Cooperate or compete: the relationship of strategic orientation and firm performance for farmers’ market vendors. Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship. 27(1), 27-42. doi: 10.1080/08276331.2014.932965

Sirolli, E. (2012, November 26). Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM

Stephenson, G., Lev., & Brewer, L. (2007). ‘I’m getting desperate’: what we know about farmers’ markets that fail. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 23(3), 188-199. doi: 10.1017/S1742170507002153