Around a year ago, KTA farm business advisor Tania Zuñiga set out to address the gap she had observed in small farmers' access to farmers markets. For beginning farmers, diversification of market streams can be key to achieving financial success, but often difficult to implement. In a post-pandemic shutdown landscape, Tania noticed that farmers were more curious to seek out new sales opportunities and connect with communities – particularly, she noted that farmers were wanting to pursue farmers markets.

Together with the Agricultural Institute of Marin (AIM), Manuel Cervantes from the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), Central Coast farm business advisor Favio Ortiz and regional coordinator Erika Vargas, Tania co-launched a cross-organizational farmers market incubator program supporting a total of 27 ALBA farmers and KTA clients over three years to help them explore and expand into farmers market channels. The program creates an opportunity for these farms to sell at three of AIM’s farmers markets over the course of a year, with participants rotating through each location every three months so they can cultivate and deepen customer relationships within different communities while providing a broader selection of healthy, culturally relevant food to consumers. From KTA’s client community, Anna’s Organic Farm, Narci Organic Farms, Solorio’s Organic Farm, Oaxax Organics, Coronel Produce Organic Farm, and Mimi’s Organic Farm will be selling at AIM’s Hayward, Clement St., and Oakland farmers markets. These participants are all BIPOC, first-generation farmers who have traditionally lacked access to direct-to-consumer market streams, with this incubator being their first opportunity to connect with and sell to these communities. 

Rotating across the three markets, the hope is that years of experience working within various farmers markets can be compressed as incubator participants engage with different customer bases, market types and each other. The combination of these various facets of the experience is intended to open up the opportunity for farmers to explore long-term participation in these markets beyond the end of the incubator, building on the momentum they seed in the next few months to foster embedded relationships with these communities.