Telluride Farmers Market Starts Its 7th Season Friday TELLURIDE – At this spring’s MountainFilm Moving Mountains Symposium on Food, keynote speaker and acclaimed environmentalist Bill McKibben painted a daunting picture of the industrial agricultural system we’ve inherited.

He spoke of the critical problems facing the globe’s ability to feed its ever-growing population; problems like salinization of water, degradation of soils, a shrinking supply of oil (a “basic ingredient of industrial agriculture”), and global warming as just a few of the crises facing the world as it moves toward a global population that is expected to exceed nine billion by 2050.

But, thankfully, McKibben didn’t leave us with a completely bleak outlook for what will be on our plates in the coming decades.

“There are some inklings of hope,” he told us. Among those inklings is the increase in the number of small family farms in the United States over the past five years – a trend that has coincided with the fast-developing popularity of America’s Farmers Markets.

If the budding prevalence of small family-farm-supporting Farmers Markets in communities across the country represents our nation’s mounting awareness of the dire need to reconstruct the planet’s food paradigm, Telluride can be proud to say that it is playing a part in this food movement. The Telluride Farmers Market celebrates the beginning of its seventh year tomorrow, on Friday, June 12, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oak Street in Telluride.

With its streetside assembly of tents harboring tables loaded with the region’s bounty, the Telluride Farmers Market stands as a rich example of how a community – even one that sits at an elevation of 9,000 feet – can eat locally, and thus, more sustainably.

All of the 36 seasonal vendors and nine weekly rotating vendors who will set up shop on Oak Street every Friday this summer have grown, baked, raised or crafted their wares from within 100 miles of Telluride. Shoppers can expect to find organic fresh-picked produce, like asparagus, salad greens and radishes, this week, with farmers’ repertoires expanding to include tomatoes, peaches, melons and so much more as the season progresses. Regional purveyors of grass-fed meats, free-range eggs, hormone-free cheese, and fine baked goods will make their summer debut at this Friday’s Farmers Market as well. Local jewelers and other artisans and craftspeople will provide non-edible diversity to the Farmers Market shopping experience.

Telluride Farmers Market Manager Chris Szymberski adds that this year’s market will include more prepared-food vendors, which he hopes will encourage people to spend the afternoon eating, as well as shopping, at the market. There will be acoustic musicians and more vendors this year than ever before; the idea behind adding more vendors, ready-to-eat lunch items, and live music, Szymberski says, is that the Farmers Market should be a kind of summertime gathering place for the community.

“It creates an opportunity for farmers, bakers, artisans, and others to get a sense of the sustainable push we’re supporting in this community, and know that they’re not standing alone but instead we’re all in this together. It’s also a place to see and really talk to the people in our community,” Szymberski says.

According to Regional Sustainability Coordinator Kris Holstrom, the Farmers Market serves the additional purpose of helping raise awareness about what foods truly are “sustainable,” amid the myriad of products we Americans currently have at our fingertips.

“We absolutely expect to be able to buy anything we want at any time – then complain that tomatoes we buy in February just aren't good. I think that can be the interesting part of the equation – learning to eat seasonally,” she says. And seasonal eating in a place like Telluride can prove challenging, she admits – but by no means is it impossible. In her years as a local farmer (she owns and operates Tomten Farm, the high-altitude farm on Hasting’s Mesa) Holstrom says she has continually been surprised at what she is able to grow in her garden, altitude 9,000 feet.

“I think the eating local challenge gets really interesting in our high-altitude, rural area. Compared to folks in California we are at a bit of a disadvantage!” she says. “That said, to me the challenge is two fold – one is to get more growers locally, the other is to actually learn what can be grown locally – and hence learn to eat differently.”

Thanks to this week’s opening of the Farmers Market, seasonal, local eating becomes not only doable but delicious. Stop by this Friday and see what bounty the region has to offer, simultaneously taking a small step towards helping create a new American food paradigm.

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