Kelly Clark
Longtime CFM Supporter & Volunteer
Chapel Hill, NC


I think the market needed me, and I needed it. – Kelly Clark

A local entrepreneur in the printing industry since 1981, Kelly began shopping at the Carrboro Farmers’ Market in the late 1980s.  A self-described Carrboro Market fanatic, she has shopped, kept a journal of purchases, volunteered, and been a staff member of the Market for nearly 25 years.  Kelly has one of the longest and deepest relationships with the Market and its producers.  Having moved from her home in Nebraska to the Chapel Hill area, it was the Carrboro Market that finally gave her the sense of community she was missing after she left her home in Lincoln. 

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Kelly Clark, Longtime supporter and Volunteer – Carrboro Farmers' Market
Date: May 8, 2011
Location: Home of Kelly Clark – Chapel Hill, NC
Interviewer & Photographer: Kate Medley

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Kate Medley:  This is Kate Medley interviewing Kelly Clark at her house in Chapel Hill on May 8, 2011. I’ll get you to start by telling us who you are and what you do?

Kelly Clark:  My name is Kelly Clark and I have been a long-time supporter of the Carrboro Farmers' Market via being a customer, via being a groupie. I have volunteered for the market and I have worked for the market in various capacities since the early 1990s.

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I think that how I ended up at the Farmers' Market though and why it became such an important part of my life and my interest in food was primarily because as a transplant—I had grown up in Lincoln all my life and I had a wonderful circle of friends there. And I missed that sense of community. And when I first started going to the Farmers' Market, which would have been in the late ‘80s, there was something communal about it.

And at first I just would go and I’d circle and I would look and the food fascinated me, the people fascinated me, but then I realized that what I was starting to feel, as I got to know people, this was the one place where I could go that felt like there was a sense of community.

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What is the Carrboro Farmers' Market?

Well the Carrboro Farmers' Market is one of the oldest farmers markets in the country, going on its thirty-second year I believe. Formally started in 1978, ’79. What everybody needs to know is that the Carrboro Market is not just one of the oldest in the country, but it’s one of the oldest farmer-run markets, which makes it very unique.

A lot of markets are started around the country by an individual who has the money and the time and the inclination and pulls together contacts and a farmers' market together. Or maybe a town starts a farmers' market. But here our market is run by the farmers, and so they have a membership that meets annually, and at that annual meeting a Board of Directors is chosen, and so that all comes from within the membership, and then on the Board—they choose the President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer.

Because it’s a farmers-run market that has some very specific rules that includes that no one can sell at the market who doesn’t grow within a 50-mile radius of the market itself, and that rule has existed from the very beginning. Along with the fact that the vendors must produce all that they are selling, so there’s no wholesaling, there’s no middleman, and that when they sell they have to be the representatives. You can't send an employee; you can't send a stand-in. You have to have somebody of the farm and a primary owner of the farm to be selling at the market.

It makes it very immediate. When I think of how long I’ve been shopping at the market, so this is since the late ‘80s and I’ve been eating local food for a long time, long before people thought about how important it was to eat locally. So when I think of my lists of what I’ve bought at the market and watched how that market, the diversity of product that’s been able to grow up within the market over the course of these years and all within a 50-mile radius, it’s pretty amazing that that factor hasn’t limited the market’s success.

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To someone who has never visited North Carolina, describe Carrboro and what role the market plays within that town.

Well I think I first want to say that the market started—it’s a Chapel Hill-Carrboro Market, and so the earlier markets were truck markets in Chapel Hill, where literally I think some of the earliest markets, they appeared in parking lots or on certain streets where a few farmers would drive up and they would pull their truck in and then literally sell out of the back-end. And then early on when the market was formulating in Chapel Hill, it resided in the parking lot of a restaurant. It was at the Church of Reconciliation. It ended up in the parking lot at East Gate Shopping Center and around that time is when it started to make its move towards Carrboro.

Because Carrboro decided that they wanted to invest and to see a market grow up in that town. And so there were funds that were sought through the Legislature in order to make a shelter on Robison Street in Carrboro, which was on some property that was owned by the Carmel Mall and so I got the sense maybe in just over the years reading articles and stuff that it was the town’s decision that they wanted to provide this for their community. And I think it just so happened that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Farmers' Market needed a residence, needed something more formal than the parking lots that they had been depending on.

And so now both Carrboro and Chapel Hill are sort of little liberal hotbeds surrounded by the conservative South and so maybe there was more of a willingness to try new things; there was an openness. I guess we’ve classified the early participants in the market in several ways. We’ve got our hippie types, the back-to-the-landers, we have folks who had been in other careers and just were willing to start over as farmers later in life—all of these types residing not only within Chapel Hill and Carrboro but there was a strong farm community in the environments of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

I think that maybe perhaps, too, Carrboro looking for a way to distinguish itself from Chapel Hill and the University, and just like when we talk about the Research Triangle Park area and everybody always talks about Raleigh and Durham and they never say Chapel Hill, probably talking about Chapel Hill, and you never say Carrboro even though they’re right next door to each other, so this friendly, walkable community that decided to invest in itself. I think that’s my description of Carrboro.

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Can you tell us a bit about what your role has been in the market since the ‘80s?

I started shopping in the late ‘80s and my habit would be to go and I would probably walk around once or twice and look and see what was what before I started buying. And then I would make my selections and I can remember as the more I started shopping, well first I was running into products that I had never seen before. So having come from Nebraska, I didn't know what cress green was; I didn't know what collards were. There were a lot of things that I—even sausage biscuits were kind of new. And at that time you could get a sausage biscuit at the market and fried pies so there were just things that I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.

I wasn’t a big shopper at a market, you know, when I left Nebraska in the early ‘80s. I was in my mid-20s and so I suppose my cooking career didn't really start until I was married and had moved to North Carolina. But this shopping started to become more than just shopping. I started to stop and talk to the farmers and get to know them.

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I started journaling my trips to the market in the early ‘90s. And I don’t know why, at one point I decided that I would write down everything that I bought at the market each and every time I went. So I have notes from nearly every visit to the market since 1992 and I record the date, the time I was there, what the weather was, and what I bought.

And I save it. Sometimes I’ll write down what I made with what I bought. Now it’s just like I can't come home—I come home and put my food away and I have to write down what I bought. I can't not do it. And if I’m out of town and I’m at another market you know I do the same thing. I write down what I bought.

So I was hanging out you know and I would shop and I would take my stuff to the car and I would go back and I would chitchat and visit. And pretty soon, I was not just on the customer side of the booths. I was actually comfortable enough to kind of sneak around and hang out on the farmer’s side of the booth and talk and learn more and I can still remember the day that Ken Dawson asked if I would please help him sell. He was busy and I got to help him sell behind his stand and I thought that was so cool. I think that both of us—both the market and myself—recognized that I was somebody that could potentially help the market in ways none of us had really thought of in a designed way.

So this is out of that shopping sort of era; I progressed towards, in the late ‘90s, a more interactive role with the farmers and out of that came our Market Guide in 1999. And I worked with Deborah Hilgenberg, who interviewed the farmers, did short vignettes on who our current farmers were and what they grew and sort of what brought them to the market in the first place. And we put that into a guide that my printing business donated the printing on, and we published that book.

And around that time the farmers, I think it was Alex and Betsy Hitt primarily, they would run little special events. The farmers would run small special events themselves. This was especially true after the market moved from the Robison Street location to the current Town Hall location. And the market was getting more well known and the traffic was increasing and the farmers were becoming more creative and I think their farmers were taking off. And they were spending, by requirement, more time on the farm than they could on the market. And so we were both looking for something.

I think the market needed me, and I needed it.

So I was available to be a volunteer and, you know, if a farmer needed help I could step in and help them sell. When the market hired the first non-farmer manager in 1995, Karl Schaefer.  When the market moved in 1996 to its current location at the Town Hall, I asked Karl, around that time between that ’96 and ’99 era, did he ever need any help. Is there anything I could do for him? He said yeah, I need a day off. I would like to teach somebody to do my job. And so I learned how to substitute manage. And so I would occasionally help Karl in that regard. I would come in on Saturday morning and set up the signs and go around and collect the money and park the farmers and do a little crowd control and do what managers do on Saturdays, and out of that I also started helping with special events and volunteering to help put on our tomato-tasting or our strawberry day or our melon-tasting.

As the market evolved in the new location we also started a Wednesday market in the afternoon and, liked the original Saturday market which was run by a farmer, the Wednesday market was also run by a farmer, up until—boy I’m really not sure of the year right off the top of my head. I think it was probably in the early 2000s. I actually managed the Wednesday market for a year for the farmers as a paid staff member, and around that same time I had become a paid staff member as a part-time special events coordinator.

And so at that point in time there weren't all these markets around the Triangle Area and we were really trying to grow the business, grow the market business, and so we were using special events to try to attract people to the market. And we did a lot of special events. In the early years of our special events promotions where we weren't just doing the tomato tasting or strawberry day or melon tasting, we started to do cooking demonstrations.

I thought people needed to learn how to cook with what they were buying. And so I remember Sheri Castle was one of the early local good cooking instructors that would help us with our cooking events at the market. We did flower arranging. We had an event where we were featuring our craft vendors. We sort of changed up the tomato event—became not just one of our tasting tomatoes, but then we were voting on which was our favorite tomato. And so I was trying to make the events larger somewhat, something so that the community could become a little more involved and more interactive, utilize that gazebo, the structure. And I think it did help the market grow in that it provided really good feed for the newspapers. So there were good pictures. There were good articles. I think it helped to create some of the public relations, the publicity that we were looking for.

Now, on the other hand, some of the farmers weren't very happy about the increase of special events because there’s a perception that parking is really bad at the current location. And that it’s too limited and that the customer is unwilling to park in outlying areas and walk in, and that some farmers really feel that the events on Saturdays in particular bring people into the market. But people are parking in spaces and staying too long and they’re spending too much time in the gazebo and not enough time shopping, and so I’d say that the events that we did at the Saturday market sort of peaked in the mid to the mid-2000s, around 2005, 2006, 2007 was probably when we were doing the most of them.

And then they’ve tapered back somewhat for those reasons, some concern on the part of the farmer that they’re an interference more than a help in part because it takes a lot of effort to do the special events, and so the manager, as the market has grown and the job of managing has become more complex because the market does more outreach—has EBT programs to help with food stamps and those kinds of things—more traffic, more customers. There’s more for the manager to watch out for on a Saturday. So early on, where a manager might be able to juggle more of the special events and along with managing now it really takes somebody who is doing that, being able to pay attention to that all the time. It’s not a full-time job by any stretch of the imagination but it takes time.

So more of our events now are on Wednesdays. It’s a little less trafficked and so there’s less traffic, so maybe there’s less of a concern that parking is an issue or that the event itself is detracting from the market. And our Saturday events are sort of back to being our highlight events of strawberry-tasting, tomato-tasting, maybe there will be a melon day, the seedling event, the larger events that maybe are showcased on the side of the seasons that aren't the ones that draw the biggest crowds in between May and August.

So at one point in time, sort of in between starting to move towards that staff member and after I was just a shopper and starting to be more than just a shopper and a volunteer, I asked the market if I could start coming to the Board Meetings because I was really fascinated about, well, how does this market work, you know, and what happens at the Board Meetings? Can I just come and listen. Yeah, they couldn’t see any reason why I couldn’t just come and listen.

So for a number of years I just went to every Board meeting and I sat and listened and kind of got in on what that small group of people have to—the kind of issues that they’re dealing with to enforce the rules, which were very thought out and have always been adhered to. But then as the diversity of product changed, then the rules have to morph to accommodate to that and just as we deal with bringing new people into the market how does that work where you’re bringing in new vendors. And I really enjoyed that. I loved going to the Board meetings and eventually I ended up feeling like I didn't just have to sit and observe—that they would tolerate me having an opinion and telling them—I think I became a de facto voice of the community, the voice of the shopper.

And so sometimes because it is a farmer-centric market and because of the fact that the farmers are running it, I think that it’s been helpful for them to occasionally hear me say, "but if you thought about this from the point of view of your customer, maybe you would have a different opinion."

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I think that the special events that I helped with over the years also helped to bring the chef community into the market and to educate the customers as to how the local food community was supporting the market and vice-versa. So we’ll be in our ninth year this year of having the Chefs Event, which is an event that brings approximately six to seven chefs into the market on a Saturday focusing food that they’ve prepared in their restaurant on a theme and allowing customers to taste some of the fancy food that’s in the area that they might not otherwise, but all of it based on chefs who’ve shopped regularly at the market.

I want to go back to your lists. And I want to ask that you pick out maybe an early list and a more recent list and read them to us in full.

Well, I think I’ll pick the very first one I wrote because that would have been the model it would have been nice to have followed.

On the opening day of market March 21, 1992 I was there from 9:00 to 10 o'clock. It was about 45-degrees. It was cool, sunny, with a slight breeze. I purchased goat cheese with black pepper, spinach and cress, tomato plants and pansies, a fried apple pie, and a Scottish sausage roll. And the fried apple pie cost 75-cents then and the Scottish sausage roll—$1.25.

I think those are Scott’s eggs that maybe—I wonder if the Fleming was there with Celebrity Dairy then or not; I don’t know for sure. I’m saying that as an aside, now to keep reading.
What was new to me was cress—not watercress. Cress comes up in corn and soybean fields in between crops. There is a native cress but a question as to whether it can be sown. You use it in salads or you blanch briefly and then steam lightly or cook with pork fat, use with other greens.

And I have no idea who gave me that information. I had a little drawing where I mapped out where the vendors were, and this would have been in the market on Robison Street. And I said there were 25 to 30 vendors that day, and some other things that were new to me were collards. Oh and I see that I’ve also listed some things that I didn't buy. I didn't buy collards or green onions. There were potatoes: there were sweet potatoes, white potatoes and red potatoes. There was spinach and some lettuce. And the tomato man was there. He had a few tomatoes there, but they were gone by 9:00.

And I wrote down that I made a spinach recipe, a sole Florentine with lemony rice, and an artichoke heart and tomato salad. And I got these recipes from The Way to Cook, The Master Recipe Book and New Recipes from Moosewood. Oh and I happened to have some Edna Valley Chardonnay and a Fumet-Blanc from Sonoma County. That is so funny.

So that was where—my notes from the first day of market, the opening day of the market in 1992.

My last notes from yesterday y was from May 7, 2011, and I went to the market with my neighbor Stephanie because I can't drive right now due to my knee surgery. We were there from 7:00 to 8:15. It was rainy during the night, and the clouds were leaving, and the sun was coming and it was cool, but it was turning warm. And yesterday I bought yogurt and Asiago cheese from Flo. I bought three stems of delphiniums from Ken Dawson: one of the stems was purple and one was white and the other was purple(y) blue. I bought some stalk flowers from Kathy at Periwinkle that were white. I got strawberries from Elise, and kohlrabi (one purple and one green from Chris Murray), some red and golden beets from Elise, some yellow and orange carrots from the Brinkley(s), some potatoes from the Brinkley(s) that I left there at the market. I do that on occasion. I buy and then I contribute to some unknown shopper.

The note beside it says, "Where are they?" [Laughs]

[Laughs] Two bags of spinach from the Zacharys, and I want to say Dalton and Hazeline Zachary will celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary this May 12th, so this week and Hazeline just turned 83. They’re at the market every Saturday in the height of the season.

I bought fennel, three small bulbs from the Brinkley(s), and red and green lettuce from Bill Dow, sugar snap peas and eggs from Mike Perry, and Japanese turnip and mustard green kimchi from April McGreger, and asparagus from the Graham(s). And then I also bought some New Orleans coffee, iced-coffee from April that she makes with chicory, which is really good. And we had a gougère from Chicken Bridge Bakery and [Laughs] the new hotdog vendor that’s there; we tried one of his farmer’s doggers which is a pork and chicken hotdog that had some of April’s horseradish relish on the top of it. And that was yesterday’s purchases.

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And who is the customer base?

Well I think it’s very broad across all age groups. I think a lot of our early morning shoppers tend to be somewhat of our older population. They’re coming to get there before the traffic heats up and the weather heats up, and we have long-time shoppers who have been shopping the market since the ‘70s. They’ve been around forever. We have young families. I see a lot of families. Later in the morning we see more college students come. You see the chefs come to the market and shop. I think that there’s just a wonderful mix of all types of people and people who will drive a long way. I mean now maybe not so much, but I can remember Sherry Castle telling me, you know, she would drive from her house in Raleigh to the Farmers Market in Carrboro every Saturday morning. That’s no small drive. I mean when you have people driving 25, 30, 40 minutes from Raleigh, from the other side of Raleigh to go to Carrboro to what was then the only market other than the State Farmers' Market, and people were driving there because they knew they were getting local.

Now I’m not degrading the State Farmers Market, I shop there too. But I know I’m getting something different. And there are local farmers there, but there’s a lot of wholesaling and there’s a lot of produce that comes from outside the local area. And so I think that people were making a pilgrimage to the Carrboro Market.

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What would you say is the biggest challenge facing the Carrboro Market in 2011? What are they really mulling over in those Board meetings right now trying to figure out?

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I do know of some of the issues that they’re dealing with. It's been hard for local small markets to adopt and adapt to the new way food stamps are dealt with now because they’re dealt with through the credit card machine system and that’s very different than the paper stamps that people were doing originally. It requires an investment on the part of the market way more than may have been envisioned originally.

And so dealing with that: how to be a market that can provide important support to populations that might not otherwise shop at the market, how to do that and not suck all of the air out of Sarah and have her focusing on that versus helping the farmers grow their market? I think that might be in my mind one of the things that the market has to continually evaluate and reevaluate. And I see this as the way the Board membership changes. Periods where the market is very much looking outward and then there’s a turn and we have to focus more inward, and we want to make sure that we’re making decisions that have to do with what’s good for the farmers—period. And then it changes, and then it’s like we have to remember that we have to reach out to our community. We have to give back to our community. How to balance giving to the community and still meeting the needs of the farmers?

The location, wonderful location—limited parking. I try to get the farmers to think about the fact that I’ve seen a lot of markets around the country and a lot of them don’t have parking and their customer base accommodates to that. But there’s a real strong perception that, especially with the growing number of markets in the area, that people are able to pick their market based on ease of shopping; I can whip in, I can park, I can run and get my stuff, I can leave.

The balance between the farmers wanting people to come and shop and leave and leave the parking spaces open for the next person, to the person who wants to go to the market because it’s their community, because it’s their social scene on Saturday morning; they want to stroll the market, they want to have a cup of coffee, they want to enjoy just looking, they want to talk to their friends—that puts them in there—out of their car and occupying a space longer than maybe some of them want. So how does the market grow? How do we reach out and continue to be a leader, because we’ve always felt like our market is a leader? And we did that by being a leader and showing how you can be a farmer-run market. We did that by showing how you can be a leader in the diversity of product. We’ve done that by showing how you can be a leader and the kind of special events that you can offer. Well how do you do that now with more competition, perception of limited access close by. Will one day the market have to think about moving if it wants to grow? There’s an absolute limit to the number of farmers that can sell there on any Saturday.

Like now, new farmers that come into the market, they’re more likely to get the opportunity to sell first on Wednesday before they’ll ever be able to sell on Saturday because there’s no room on Saturday. So is this market going to be satisfied being this big or is it going to want to be bigger? If it wants to be bigger where will it go? How will it do that? Can it be the Carrboro Market if it’s not at Town Hall, you know? Is our identity tied to our location or is our identity in our farmers? So now these are some of the things that I think about in terms of listening to what the market deals with and whether or not they’ve actually talked about those things specifically this year, I don’t know.

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They’re always going to be a farmer-run market; they will never not be that. How do you bring new farmers in? How do you encourage young people to go into farming, providing them an opportunity to sell direct to the public and having enough opportunity within our own community? The more that other markets grow up in our area, the more opportunity for young farmers to go and start there. And that I think is a big challenge for the Carrboro Market because it is mature, because it has a limitation of space. How will we continue to be able to bring new people in? So I think that just the changing way that people eat—even the challenge of the perception that the Carrboro Market, because I think it has this reputation, everything is organic. Well no, it’s not. [Laughs] And so even the satisfying our customers and helping them understand that they have to be actively engaged with finding out for themselves: Are you buying from somebody who is growing organically? Are you buying from somebody who grows sustainably? Are you buying from a transitional farmer who has been growing tobacco all their life and is changing to a vegetable farm and how that process is long and one that doesn’t guarantee that they’re doing things organically?

So, being able to be a market that accommodates to all sorts of vendors and all sorts of customers, that I think is some of our challenges.

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I think one of the most important things to me and why I was excited that SFA was going to do this oral history project, I think we got to work hard and fast and Sarah Blacklin and I have talked about this: this market needs to get its history recorded. We need to get it on paper. We've already lost too many opportunities with farmers who are no longer with us to capture those early thoughts and early days of the market. But to me, this market has been so long lasting and over the years, so innovative. You’ve seen very interesting young farmers come out or come into the market and push the boundaries of traditional thinking about what would be on your table. I bet you if we looked at a table from 1978 you’d see some very typical southern products, your sweet potatoes and zucchinis and corn and greens of some sort. But over the years this diversification of the product that’s followed the natural way that people have begun to eat over the last 10 years, so more ethnic food, more exploratory palates you know.

But what’s important to me and why I think it’s so important that we—I like the fact that you’ve picked 10 different farmers to talk to, but I wish you could talk to all of them because everyone’s story is so unique and they’re so different. I mean people who’ve come to farming that have never been in farming; people whose families have been in farming all their life but they’re having to change the way they’re farming because of the changing ways that people are eating, or the fact that tobacco isn't supported the way it used to be, or they want to stay in farming but they can't farm like they traditionally did. Or somebody like John Soehner, who not from a farming background, but by god, he’s thrown himself into farming with his whole body and soul. He’ll try anything so everything that’s come around. He’ll watch another farmer and he’ll try it and he’s like, I have no idea what I’m doing, but you know the spirit of trying and to capture all of that in their own voice. That’s one thing I would like to help do, is to quickly—within the next couple of years— capture the voices that are at the market now, find the ones who aren't selling but were in the recent past in order to make sure that we don’t lose the unique tale that this market has to tell.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.