Farmers Markets Editing and Proofreading Services

A customer buys tomatoes in April from a stall with a farm name on the banner. They were grown four hundred miles away by somebody else and bought at a terminal market that morning. The market's rules say vendors must sell what they produce. What they do not say is what "produce" means, who checks, or what happens on the second occasion — and the vendors who do grow their own have noticed.

We edit what farmers' markets and market organisations produce — vendor agreements and application forms, producer rules and eligibility criteria, inspection and verification procedures, stall allocation and fee policies, complaint and enforcement processes, food safety and insurance requirements for vendors, signage and customer-facing material, and grant applications and board documents. Our editors work on rules a volunteer board has to enforce against people they know.

The producer rule and its verification is the document a farmers' market lives or dies by, and its failure is a principle stated without a test. Every market says vendors sell what they grow; the ones that mean it have written down how they know. We work through these so the rule defines what counts as produced by the vendor in categories rather than in the abstract — grown, raised, caught, foraged, baked, made from purchased ingredients — since a baker and a market gardener cannot be governed by one sentence; so any permitted resale is named with its limits and how it must be signed at the stall, because a market that allows some resale and hides it loses more trust than one that allows none; so verification is described as a procedure with a farm visit right, the notice given, who conducts it and what they may ask to see, given that a rule nobody can check is a rule the honest vendors subsidise; so the evidence a vendor must be able to produce is listed — seed and plant receipts, field areas, livestock records, production volumes against sales — as this is what makes a visit short; so the consequence is graded and stated in advance with who decides and the appeal route; so the customer-facing sign explains what the rule guarantees; and so enforcement is written so a volunteer can carry it out without a personal argument. Rules written this way protect the vendors who are complying.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including vendor applications, complaints and board material. We are editors rather than market managers, inspectors or lawyers, and we offer no view on eligibility, enforcement or any vendor. What we can do is make the rule enforceable by the people who have to enforce it.