The Eugene Fill Your Pantry Market took place at the Stellaria Building, 150 Shelton McMurphey Boulevard, the new location of Hummingbird Wholesale. The Willamette Farm and Food Coalition organized the event which was also sponsored by Hummingbird and the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project. Like the event in Shedd, customers were lined up to get in long before noon when the market opened. A steady crowd filtered through the warehouse on the south side of the building from opening to closing. For one o'clock to three-thirty, the vendors and shoppers were entertained by Skinner City old timey string band from Eugene.
The Fill-your-pantry Markets are intended to be a meaningful addition to the many farmers’ markets that take place in western Oregon. We are accustomed to seeing fresh produce and fruit sold in season at our farmers' markets, but local grains and beans, particularly locally grown and milled flours, sold directly by farmers to customers is something new. In the case of local beans and grains, which can cost more than non-local products, direct sales help keep prices down.
From the beginning, one important issue for the Bean and Grain Project work has been food security and the rebuilding of our local food system. The increased availability of local bulk beans, whole grains, and flours at prices that are both profitable for the farmer and affordable to the buyer is an important part of this. Central to the process is increasing the public awareness for these products and how to use them to reduce food expenditures at home while also increasing the nutrition of the meals prepared. This is food security at its most basic.
Six vendors took part in the market. Camas Country Mill–hard red and white wheat flour, soft white pastry flour, spelt flour, rye flour, buckwheat flour, teff flour, hard red wheat berries, hard white wheat berries, garbanzo beans, black beans, whole flax seed, green lentils, red lentils, and crimson lentils; Open Oak Farm–red and yellow flint corn, buckwheat, dark rye, hulless oats, beets, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, daikon, black radishes, turnips, dry beans (hutterite, Swedish browns, yellow-eye, Tiger's eye, Orca), garlic; Lonesome Whistle Farm–golden and purple hulless barley, buckwheat flour, four kinds of potatoes, two kinds of winter squash, four kinds (calypso, rio zape, Dutch bullet, Vermont cranberry) of dry beans, Dakota black popcorn; McKenzie River Organic Farm–five varieties of winter squash and yellow onions; Heritage Foods & Seeds–red sweet whole corn, red sweet corn meal, rye grain, rye flour, hulless oat flour; Lively Organic Farm–butternut squash, Musquee do Provence squash; Slo Farm–apples and apple sauce; Organic Redneck, MacKenzie River Farm–squash, onions, cabbage, shallots, beets, apples.
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Special thanks is extended to The Willamette Farm and Food Coalition and The Ten Rivers Food Web, Hummingbird Wholesale, and the Evergreen Hill Fund of Oregon Community Foundation for for their continued support of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project.
