12-22 NWR Farmers' Markets

This is your Northwest report for Thursday, December 22, I am David Sparks and I have been reporting over the last five years on the exponential growth of farmers markets which are particularly strong throughout the Northwest. As an example, in Idaho the farmers market in Boise started with a few hundred consumers showing up at the very beginning and 10 years later, well over 20,000 people attend on any given Saturday during the season. The same is true of farmers markets in Oregon and Washington. Well, a new farm survey details, "what is going on in terms of directly marketed farm goods" according to Joe Parsons with the USDA statistics department who surveyed thousands of farmers in 2015. The report details food sold directly by farmers to consumers within 20 miles of their own farm and Parsons says that with this information "you can get a sense of what local really means". Total local direct sales in 2015 added up to $8.7 billion which is small compared to $379 billion for all of agriculture but marketer Eleanor Starbor told us "the community that is selling into local markets is very large, 167,000 producers nationally and it is very diverse."

Elsewhere, for those of you who claim that sleeping is a waste of time, or you simply don't give into the fact that sleep is a necessity because of job responsibilities on the farm, Washington State University's health sciences campus in Spokane Washington led by Hans Van Dongen has found, not surprisingly, that repeated sleep loss can cause a variety of ills, from sleep disorders to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weight issues, metabolic problems, gastrointestinal illness and cancer.