Join us on the Courthouse Square in Spencer

Saturday mornings

8 a.m. until noon

May through October

 Enjoy the bounty of our rich farmland while supporting the Indiana farmers who bring it to you. For the crisp character and radiance of freshly-picked produce, visit the Community Farmers’ Market of Owen County.

We feature local producers offering, in season, bedding plants, cut flowers, more produce types than you ever imagined, jams and jellies, baked goods, meat, eggs, herbs, hand crafted treasures and MUCH, MUCH MORE!

For more information contact the Market Master at 812-829-2605 or 812-821-1688

 

This Week at the Market:

For: Saturday, August 30

CFMOC will kick off our celebration of the first annual statewide GOING LOCAL Week (August 31 – September 6) with great local food and entertainment. This week the “Chef’s Corner” will feature Ed O’Brien, long-time Spencer restaurateur, with a demonstration and tasting of Gazpacho soup. Gazpacho soup was invented for the summer. Refreshingly cold on hot summer days, this adaptation of the classic Spanish cold tomato soup deliciously combines the best of summer vegetables. Make sure you use only the freshest, highest quality ingredients for this soup and they are waiting for you at the Farmers’ Market. Recipes will be available.

In addition to garden-fresh produce, CFMOC vendors offer many unique works of art. How about a hand carved walking stick made from native wood for those relaxing hikes. Bring birds to your home with an inviting one-of-a-kind gourd birdhouse. Each week brings different fun and unusual things to the market.

 Eric Vagedes takes the stage at 10:00 a.m. to entertain with his smooth musical tones. Stop by the Market Café to be tempted by newly baked muffins and cookies complemented with a cup of freshly brewed coffee.

Make it your tradition to celebrate GOING LOCAL every week at the Community Farmers’ Market of Owen County. Join us on the Courthouse Square in Spencer from 8 a.m. until noon. We are growing for YOU!

Hoosiers Encouraged to Participate in GOING LOCAL

 Week by Eating More Local Foods

Special Events Scheduled at the Community Farmers’ Market of Owen County

The Community Farmers’ Market of Owen County encourages everyone to participate in GOING LOCAL Week (August 31 – September 6) by joining us Saturday mornings on the Courthouse Square in Spencer from 8 a.m. until noon. CFMOC will kick off our celebration on August 30^th with great local food and entertainment. This week the “Chef’s Corner” will feature Ed O’Brien, long-time Spencer restaurateur, with a demonstration and tasting of Gazpacho soup. Gazpacho soup was invented for the summer. Refreshingly cold on hot summer days, this adaptation of the classic Spanish cold tomato soup deliciously combines the best of summer vegetables. Emily Dieter, 2001 Miss Owen County, will be the guest chef on September 6. She plans to feature under utilized okra and eggplant in her culinary creations prepared on the spot and offered for you to taste. Recipes will be available. Make sure you use only the freshest, highest quality ingredients for your special recipes and they are waiting for you at the Farmers’ Market.

The entertainment at CFMOC begins at 10 a.m. and is always top notch. Eric Vagedes takes the stage on August 30 to entertain with his smooth musical tones. You might know Eric as a local farm drainage expert but he is also a fantastic singer!

September 6 brings a special musical treat with “Stella & Jane” – a very popular Bloomington trio comprised of Bobbie Jane Lancaster, Jeff Foster and Stella Suzette Weakley who will knock your socks off. Their tight harmonies, guitar, mandolin, and fiddle create music with a bluesy-bluegrassy-folk feel that make them loved by audiences from Nashville, TN to Austin, TX, to good old Indiana.  Stella & Jane were selected as a "Runner Up" in the December 2005 and October 2007 rounds of the Song of the Year song and lyric competition. Song of the Year receives entries from all over the world and only the top entries achieve Runner Up status.

Looking ahead to September 13, Tim Grimm will grace the stage of CFMOC. Tim is a nationally acclaimed singer-songwriter, actor and Bartholomew County hay-farmer with a traditionalist’s love for classic folk and bluegrass. Performances at CFMOC by Stella & Jane and Tim Grimm are made possible with support from the Bloomington Area Arts Council, the Indiana Arts Commission, a state agency and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Please support your neighbors by shopping at the Community Farmers’ Market of Owen County and other local farmers’ markets. For further information about CFMOC contact volunteer Market Master, Gwen Dieter, at 812-821-1688. Read on to find out more about the impact of “going local”. This information was provided by the organizers of the first annual GOING LOCAL Week.

An increasing number of individuals are rejecting well traveled food items in favor of more locally grown and produced ones. They call themselves “locavores”. The term refers to individuals who choose only to eat foods that have been grown and/or raised within 100 miles of their homes. Locavores pride themselves on finding and using ingredients that are locally available and in season. While few can realistically adhere to the extreme “rules” of a locavore diet, more and more individuals are expressing a desire to eat fresh, local, and in season food. In fact, the trend toward eating local food is the number one culinary trend in the United States. The supporters of GOING LOCAL Week in Indiana hope to encourage Hoosiers to follow that trend and eat more locally grown and produced food for a number of reasons.

Why Eat Local?

Depending on whom you ask, people have different reasons for wanting to put locally grown food on their tables. Some approach it by promoting the pure pleasure of eating freshly harvested food, the availability of varieties of food that are not normally stocked in grocery stores, and getting back in touch with the seasonality of their food. For some, it’s about food safety and the ability to trace a product back to its producer. Many note that locally grown food doesn’t sit on the shelves for a long time before it is consumed and is more nutritious. Others have an economic view reminding us that some experts point out over 200 farms per day in our country are closed or incorporated into larger enterprises.  And there are those who voice concern for our environment and the use of fossil fuels in food transportation quoting the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s statement that the average tomato travels 1,569 miles from the field to the grocery store.

The Economic Impact of Local Food Purchases in Indiana

Whatever the route, the conclusion is still the same. Eating local food is good for us, good for our environment, good for the strength of our Indiana farms and statewide food system, and good for the Indiana economy. The collective economic impact of each individual shopper who makes a choice to buy local food is astounding. If half of the over 2 million families in Indiana would spend $25.00 a month on local foods, the annual immediate economic impact to our local farm economy would exceed $300 million dollars. That number is further enhanced by the fact that a dollar spent on local food will “turn over” a number of times in the community so the initial dollar may actually generate an economic impact of several more dollars as the producer spends his/her dollar locally and others who then receive those dollars do the same.  A recent study on the impact of local food dollars spent in the Seattle area demonstrated that for every $100 spent on local food, the local community benefitted by $200-$500 in economic impact. If we use that calculation for the aforementioned $300 million, then the economic impact to Indiana local communities could be in excess of between $600 million and $1.5 billion dollars per year!

GOING LOCAL Week

GOING LOCAL Week is a one week “challenge” to Indiana citizens to eat at least one Indiana locally grown or produced food at each meal during the seven day event which is scheduled for August 31-September 6th, 2008. 

The objectives of GOING LOCAL Week are to:

·       Create an appreciation for the abundance and diversity of the Indiana food shed.

·        Make Indiana citizens more aware of the availability of local foods in their own communities.

·        Provide support and recognition for Indiana local food producers.

·        Increase Indiana residents’ consumption of locally grown/produced foods in a long term effort to encourage them to regularly purchase more locally produced items for their weekly meals so that “eating of Indiana locally grown and produced foods will become the norm, not a novelty at Hoosier dinner tables across the state”.

According to the GOING LOCAL Week event supporters, when you buy local food, you are making a conscious choice to better your families’ eating habits, protect the environment, and improve the local rural economy. How do you start? It doesn’t take a tremendous effort--small changes can make a big difference.

·        Do some of your weekly shopping at local farmers’ markets, farm stands, and farm markets. (Beware of roadside sellers who give the appearance of a local producer but are actually selling produce trucked in from other states.)

·        Visit an orchard or U-Pick and harvest your own produce.

·        Ask your local market if they sell locally grown food. Find restaurants that do the same. Support these establishments.

·        Participate in a CSA.

·        Take a farm tour in your area.

·        Research special foods that may be local to your area and seek them out.

·        Take a cooking or food preservation class which features local foods.

·        Encourage others to join you in this effort during GOING LOCAL Week. Host a pitch-in picnic or covered dish party and ask everyone to bring something made with local ingredients. Spend the evening talking about the food’s origins and learning about what’s available in your area.

 

Indiana Local Food Resources

 

Information about Indiana food and producers, listings of local food events and farm tours, as well as recipes featuring Indiana’s fresh, local, and in-season foods can be found on the GOING LOCAL site (www.goinglocal-info.com).

 

To find local foods and food producers, individuals are encouraged to use Indiana Market Maker which is a searchable data base of Indiana food and food producers (http://in.marketmaker.uiuc.edu).   

GOING LOCAL Week is supported by the GOING LOCAL site, Purdue University New Ventures Team, Office of Building Better Communities at Ball State, Indiana Cooperative Development Center, and the Purdue Extension.