FRESH BEHAVIOR Vouchers prove a win-win for seniors and growers BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

It’s a hazy recent Thursday, and Edna Mae Hamrick, 76, waits patiently until 3 p.m., surveying the apples, peaches, and corn she will buy once the Parade Street farmers’ market at Providence’s Dexter Training Ground opens for business. "I like to come and get the fruits and vegetables," Hamrick explains. They are "fresher . . . than what you get there," at the grocery store.

Hamrick, who came with her daughter from her nearby home near Westminster Street, will buy her produce not with cash, but a small packet of pink slips that she got from the state’s Division of Elderly Affairs. The slips, formally known as Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program vouchers, are available for the first time this year to Rhode Islanders 60 or older whose incomes are less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level (about $16,600 for one person). The $200,000 effort is modeled after a federal nutrition program for women, infants, and children — known casually as WIC — which has had a farmers’ market component for some time.

With the introduction of these programs, says Lisa Kushner, "market master" for the nonprofit DownCity farmers’ market, "Government is basically saying, ‘We’re going to help low-income seniors, and we’re going to be supporting agriculture, particularly small farmers.’ "

By 3:30 on this weekday, the Parade Street market bustles with people who weigh tomatoes and pick through bushels of peaches, signing their individual $5 vouchers over to one of the market’s five vendors. "I didn’t know they take WIC!" exclaims Shirley McMorris of Providence. "This is my first time here. I’m very pleased," she explains. "When you go to the grocery store, if it’s not on sale, you’re going to pay" more than at the farmers’ market. Plus, "It’s good and fresh, the people are nice. They treat you with kindness."

Farmers at this market also accept cash, but judging from how many pink slips are exchanged, this is not a cash market. Indeed, the prevailing method of payment varies with the neighborhoods where farmers’ markets are located. In the area around the Parade Street market, for instance, 51 percent of the children under six live in poverty. By contrast, in the US Census tract around Hope High School on the East Side — the site of another farmers’ market — just two percent of such children meet the federal definition of poverty.

By selling produce directly to consumers at markets, local farmers bypass the middleman in the retail process, increasing their profit and speeding the trip for produce from the fields to dinner tables.

The first such market in Rhode Island, the Governor Dyer Cooperative Market in Providence, has been in operation since before the 1930s, according to Peter Susi, farmers’ market coordinator at the state Division of Agriculture. As the state has become less rural, farmers’ markets have continued to crop up in urban areas. Now, says Susi, "You can go to a farmers’ market pretty much any day of the week. There’s [always] one operating somewhere." (A list of markets can be found at www.state.ri.us/dem/ programs/bnatres/agricult/markets.htm.)

The WIC nutrition program, which last year pumped $170,000 into the hands of farmers, has been one of the driving forces behind this expansion, he says. Susi predicts the nutrition vouchers for seniors will have a similar effect: "If there’s an urban area where there’s a high concentration of seniors with these coupons, I guarantee a farmers’ market will open up there."

And if one does, Margaret Carey, a grower with Portsmouth’s Maplewood Farm, describes the feeling likely to prevail among both farmers and shoppers: "It’s a win-win situation."