On this gloriously rainy day I came across a recently released USDA report that looks at trends in locally marketed food. The report talks a lot about the demographics of farmers selling local food and where these farms tend to be, but one of the most interesting factoids it contains is this:
Fruit and vegetable farms with local food sales employed 61,000 workers in 2008, or 13 full time employees per million dollars of sales, while fruit and vegetable farms not engaged in local food sales employed only 3 full time employees per million dollars of sales.
As Mother Jones' Tom Philpott puts it, "In other words, a dollar you spend at the farmers market supports four times as many workers as a dollar spent at the supermarket."
