Market on the Square
2018 © K. W. Bridges www.kimbridges.com
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Adventures in Travel Finding a farmers’ market is a treat. We like to explore the foods that are outside the uniformity of the typical supermarket produce section. You’re never sure what you’ll find. There’s bound to be a few interesting nuggets hidden amongst the piles of seasonal bounty. That’s what drew us to the Saturday on the Square. Our enemy: we didn’t have much time. The strategy to handle such situations is to take a lot of photos. “Run and gun” (i.e., in a hurry with no time to think); image composition is not very important. We use a lot of time later to examine the pictures. What did we see? How can we analyze the collection? Can we make sense of all this? Add the element of Internet searching. This adds depth to our interpretation. That’s what we did. We spent about 5% of our time on the street in the market; 95% was devoted to assembling this story.
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A “google eye� view of the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. Saturday on the Square fills the sidewalks that surrounds this large edifice and its tree-filled grounds.
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A Real Farmers’ Market They call it "Saturday on the Square." You find it in downtown Madison. The "square" is the block surrounding the Wisconsin state capitol building. This shopping event runs from mid-April to early November. Vendors are ready at 6:15 AM and the action stops just before 2 PM. This is a well-established endeavor. It’s been running for about 46 years. The stated goal of the Saturday gathering is to unite the rural and urban cultures. It accomplishes this with the selling done by the farmer. No middle-man sales here. This strategy appears successful in forging a tighter link between people who would otherwise rarely, if ever, connect with each other.
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A Short Visit Do we have time to visit the market? Our schedule gives us just an hour on a Saturday, early in June, before we must head to the airport. We aren't even sure there will be a market. Thunderstorms rocked the night. Did the rain linger? The morning skies are clear. The showers have moved far to the south. We can stop on the way to the airport. We’ve got time. We find a convenient parking spot just a block from the capitol. It’s 8:30 AM. We’ve got to move fast if we’re go to check out what’s here.
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Walking the Circuit Crowds fill the sidewalk. Vendors’ tents stand side to side. Tables overflow with interesting things. Strict protocols run the event. Vendor locations depend on seniority. Reserved sidewalk locations last for the season. The protocols even involve the customers. You walk in one direction (counter-clockwise) around the block. The result appears to be a smooth operation. Frequent customers know where to go and they get to their destination with little problem. That’s remarkable given the size of the crowd.
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Variety from the Farm There are lots of fresh produce farmers. A few sell flowers, too. Here and there, you see other things made on the farm.
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Producers Only This event, the Saturday on the Square, is part of the Dane County Farmers’ Market. The effort began in 1972 and has grown to be the country’s largest producers-only farmers’ market. The designation "producers-only" is special. It means they can sell only things from their farm and, as mentioned earlier, they must be present at the sales site.
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Expected Number of Fresh and Stored Produce Items
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April May Our Visit
June July August September October November
Fresh
December
Stored
January February March
Items
Season Length for Fresh Produce Items 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1
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Months
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50
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Seasonality Produce in our supermarket comes from many places. Hothouses and long-distance transport provide a season-free supply of most vegetables and fruit. It is easy to forget the seasonal abundance provided by farms in temperate regions. Produce listings for Wisconsin (next page) show the typical market availability and seasonality. Some items are in the market for just a few weeks. Other items last for many months. The average length of time an item is available in the market is about 3.5 months. Strawberries, for example, are here for about two months. In a Costco supermarket, you expect to buy strawberries year-round. An analysis of market availability shows five seasons: November-March, April-May, June-July, August-September, and October. A large divide separates November-May (7 months) and JuneOctober (5 months).
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Apples Asparagus Basil Beets Bitter melon Blueberries Bok Choy Broccoli Brussels sprouts Cabbage Cantaloupes Carrots Cauliflower Key Celery 0: absent 1: available Chard Chive Cilantro Corn Cucumbers Eggplant Fava Beans Fennel Garlic Grapes Green beans Green onions Greens (various) Herbs Kale Kohlrabi Leeks Lettuce (various) Melons Mint Onions Parsnips Pea greens Peas Peppers (sweet) Potatoes Pumpkins Radishes Raspberries Rhubarb Rutabagas Shelling beans Spinach Summer Squash Strawberries Sweet Potatoes Tomatoes Turnips Watermelons Wild Rice Winter Squash Zucchini Zucchini Blossoms
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1
1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0
1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Raw Data
Fresh Produce
January
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The Checklist: Anticipating the Produce A checklist is a standard tool used by many people who do fieldwork. A botanist will have a list of plants once collected in the region. An ornithologist goes out with a local bird list. Websites, like www.thespruceeats.com, list Wisconsin’s produce and the months or seasons when each is available. Assembling information from several such websites provides a good starting point. We used both an annual and monthly list to analyze the produce we saw on our visit. This example checklist has only the June produce:
□ Asparagus X □ Beets X □ Bok Choy X □ Broccoli X □ Cabbage X □ Carrots X □ Chive X □ Cilantro X □ Corn X □ Fennel X □ Green onions X □ Greens (various) X □ Kale X
□ X Kohlrabi □ X Lettuce (various) □ X Mint □ X Onions □ X Pea greens □ X Potatoes □ X Radishes □ Raspberries □ X Rhubarb □ X Spinach □ X Strawberries □ X Wild Rice □ X Zucchini Blossoms
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Seasonal Favorites It is still early in the season. There are a few early products in plentiful supply. Green onions, asparagus, carrots, beets, radishes, and rhubarb are piled high. Seeing this abundance must be a welcome change after a long winter. These items are icons of the spring.
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Varietal Variability You get interesting choices in the market. A beet with stripes inside? How unusual! It’s not all about looks. The taste is likely different, too. There is a lot to explore here. Sales of these distinct varieties help maintain stocks of genetic diversity. That’s important in the long-run as breeders cope with the challenges of climate change, disease and insect attacks. It’s also fun. An unusual variety can bring a nice surprise to the dining table.
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Jumping the Gun Some produce in the market appears ahead of the usual time for it to appear (see the June checklist). Tomatoes provide a good example. Field grown tomatoes usually come to market starting in July. Those seen in June are likely grown in a hothouse. Most of the early tomatoes are the expected “commercial” varieties. Here and there you’ll spot a wild assortments of heirloom tomatoes.
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Less Common Produce You can often find unique produce in farmers’ markets. Sometime it’s an unusual species. Other times it might be an unexpected variety. Often, it is produce that’s important in an ethic cuisine. This type of market provides a resource for people who sell specialized crops. Some items may be produce that is out of fashion but is still remembered (and used) by a small population. Other crops supply immigrants looking for traditional foods or close analogs. There may be a few things that a farmer believes an adventurous “foodie” will want.
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Greens and Herbs Like to eat salads? The market is a great place to start. Leafy greens dominate. No compact heads of iceberg lettuce here. You find a wide choice of greens for the base of the salad and plenty of herbs to add for flavor.
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Corn for Popping It’s too early for sweet corn. Popcorn, since it is a stored product, is found in several forms in the market. Some is popped and ready to eat. Most comes as kernels. You do the popping yourself. Several vendors sell bags of kernels. The surprise is that the kernels come in many colors. You can even find cobs with the kernels still attached. The recipe is provided: put cob in a paper bag and microwave 2.5 to 3 minutes on high. You can’t find that in a supermarket.
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Mushrooms There were a few vendors with mushrooms. Many of the mushrooms are farm raised. Others are wild harvested. Both sources are allowed by market rules. There was great contrast between the uniformity of the button mushrooms and the irregularity of those harvested from the wild.
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Really Unusual Things There were a few head-turning items. Rules strictly limit the kinds of things that are sold at the market. This favors the common, wellestablished products. None the less, a few items were on sale that fall outside the norms.
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Approximate locations of the vendor stands, classified by the dominate type of items for sale (see color key on next page). Cell phone GPS accuracy is lower than desired but is adequate to show the general distribution of the types of vendors.
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Beyond Produce There is a wide variety of items sold at Saturday on the Square. We expected to see produce as the dominant item on display. We walked through the market quickly, going with the flow of the crowd. A cell-phone image or two was taken at most of the stalls. This let us get around the 2,166 ft of sidewalks surrounding the capitol building. A visual analysis divided the photos into one of five categories. Just one photo of each vendor’s stand was included in this set of 129 images. This wasn’t all of the vendors; our bias was toward those selling produce. Produce was most common (44%) and nursery vendors were not far behind (29%).
Produce
Nursery
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Plants in Many Forms One farmer’s sign said it all, “Plants – Veggies – Decoratives.” It makes sense that the market’s goal, connecting the urban and rural populations, would include ornamentals. Even in the dense urban setting, many people have room for a pot of herbs on their balcony. Potted selections ranged from tall to tiny. Hanging baskets were in plentiful supply. It’s a strict market rule: no fancy containers. You’re selling plants, not pottery.
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Processed Food Pickles, relishes, jams and jellies are the sorts of items lumped into the Processed Food category. Maple syrup and honey is in this group, too. Together, about 12% of the vendors are selling these products. Some of these products are what you would expect: Bread & Butter pickles and Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam. Pickled Asparagus; maybe not so much. But, Bloody Mary Mix? That’s unusual. Welcome to a farmers’ market.
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Cheese This is Wisconsin. The state motto: America’s Dairyland. Of course there is cheese here! The rules for selling cheese are complex but one requirement is clear: the farmers must have had a significant role in the process. Specialty cheeses of all sorts were on display. The most abundant type is the regional favorite: cheese curd. Take these home, give them a light batter then cook in a deep fryer at 375 degrees for one minute. If you’re Canadian, mix the curd with fries and cover with gravy; it’s poutine.
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Baked Goods This category, with 9% of the vendors, was likely undercounted. Most likely, in terms of popularity, the sales of baked goods was greater than the other items at the market. Breads of all description dominated. Close behind were baked items you can nibble while walking the market. Picking up something from a bakery stand might be a weekly event for people living in the neighborhood.
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Coda We hope that you enjoyed our quick trip around the Saturday on the Square. You probably noticed that there were a few technical things. Like the table of produce availability and the analysis of seasonality. The main purpose was to help interpret what we saw in the market. Were we there at the peak time? No, that comes in August according to the data. Is this mostly a produce market? No, produce seems to be about half of the market at this time of the year. Stuff like that. This also became a place to store hints of the technology useful for analyzing similar field data. Extracting and mapping photo locations is an example. This exercise let us examine the quality of the location data so that we can better understand when it might be useful. Having dug into the data this deeply, we’d like to return to the market a few times during the year to see the differences through the seasons. But we live far away. We’ll have to be content with this one visit.
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Notes Page
Comment
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The image is from Google Earth Pro. Note the use of photogrammetry in creating realistic 3D images of the buildings and vegetation.
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Information about Saturday on the Square is available from www.dcfm.org.
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Farmer rules are on the DCFM website. Look at members > member resources > DCFM Rule Book.
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The availability chart data came primarily from www.thespruceeats.com. Additional information came from Wikipedia. The data were entered into a spreadsheet, separating the periods with fresh versus stored produce availability. The two charts were extracted from these data using row and column totals. The fresh produce data are shown on page 14.
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The average length of time an item is in the market was calculated from the values in the table on page 14.
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Comment The five seasons interpretation used the data table (page 14) in the statistical package PAST (folk.uio.no/ohammer/past). A K-means dendrogram provided the basis for the interpretation (see below). The red line shows where the dendrogram segments have been “cut� in the analysis.
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Page
Comment
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This is a traditional 2-way table, a favorite of data analysts who look for patterns in sparse data (i.e., contains a lot of zero values). The data source is in the page 12 note.
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The checklist was extracted from the data on page 14. Note that one item, raspberries, was not seen in the photos that were taken.
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The photos were taken with a Google Pixel 2 XL cell phone camera. These images get an automatic GPS location that is stored in the photo EXIF data. Photos were examined and one image of each vendor photographed was assigned a star-code value. The values are categories representing the dominant item being sold. These data were added to the EXIF information using Photo Mechanic (camerabits.com). Information was extracted using ExifTool (www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool). ExifTool uses a command line to control the extraction. The following command created a simple file (extracted.txt) from all
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Comment of the photos stored in the folder photo_folder. exiftool -FileName -xmp:rating -EXIF:GPSLatitude -EXIF:GPSLongitude -T photo_folder > extracted.txt
The file extracted.txt was opened in a spreadsheet. The latitude and longitude values were converted to decimal with a function, =deg+(min/60)+(sec/3600). Note, the W longitudes must be negative numbers. Further operation were done in the spreadsheet to create a file with a file name, category color, latitude and longitude. This information was saved to a file.
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The web application GPS Visualizer (GPSVisualizer.com) was used with the location file to create a Google Maps overlay. The pie chart was created from an analysis of the category frequencies listed in the photo spreadsheet.