I’d bet that if you said “farmers market” to someone in the Des Moines area they would immediately think of the Downtown Farmers Market in downtown Des Moines on Saturday mornings.  Well a close rival to the Downtown market is the Valley Junction Farmers Market on Thursday evenings.  It’s at Fifth and Railroad in West Des Moines and runs from 4:00 to 8:00PM until September 27th.

My family and I visited the market yesterday evening.  We arrived rather late, which is a mistake this time of year as local farmer’s crops are not quite up to full production and a lot of items were sold out before we arrived. 

We met Amy Boyer, who with her husband Jason, own The Harvest Barn in Osceola.  The Boyers had vegetables and fudge to sell but Amy was quick to point out that their main focus was on their Limosine/Angus natural beef and natural pork products.  She was very excited when I mentioned that I was looking at ways to create a local food distribution business.  She mentioned that they had been debating about how to sell to metro customers once the farmer’s markets close for the season… this reinforced my feeling that their is a need to provide local food distribution options especially in the winter months. 

You can find out more about the Boyers at their website: www.theharvestbarn.com

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 12:53 pm and is filed under local food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.