Economic Accessibility of Farmers’ Markets in New York State
A geospatial analysis of the distribution of farmers’ markets in New York State and their accessibility to low-income families
“Farmers’ markets are an important way for citizens to eat healthy fresh food while supporting small family farms.”
One criticism of farmers' markets is that they are largely inaccessible to many Americans, especially those of low socioeconomic status.
Does the data reflect this criticism?”
This analysis attempts to discern how accessible farmers' markets are to the lowest economic bracket of Americans. It has long been argued that those who are at an economic disadvantage and must rely on food stamps and other forms of nutritional benefit programs are more likely to eat unhealthy food. As such, they are disproportionately affected by obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes.
It has been argued that this is due, in large part, to the inaccessibility and affordability of healthy, organic, or locally produced food.
For a time, this could be attributed to the nature of farmers’ markets as open-air, relaxed settings, largely devoid of methods for accepting electronic payments.
In 2009, a study shows that only 900 out of 5,000 farmers’ markets accepted food benefits. In 2020, that number has grown exponentially. This may very well be attributed to the emergence of technology that makes accepting electronic payments convenient, such as CUBE or Stripe.
For this particular analysis, the focus centered on farmers’ markets across New York State, and the distribution of markets that accept various forms of benefits.
Markets were geospatially mapped by longitude and latitude to demonstrate their spread. Although other information was included in the dataset, such as city, zip code, and occasionally an address, longitude, and latitude served to be the best identifiers here. While the coordinates ensure accuracy of location, they do present difficulties when subjected to the process of graphing data.
The distribution of markets in New York State can be seen in the plot below, which shows the distribution of credit as an accepted form of payment.
The color distribution has been used to indicate each form of payment’s status as accepted (yellow) or not (blue). Credit can be viewed almost as a control, although not entirely.
Credit is a much more common form of payment in general, although many farmers’ markets still operate in a strict cash environment. The significance of the acceptance of credit is that it suggests that the vendors have the means to process benefits payments, such as the EBT food stamps debit card.
Aside from credit, four other payment methods were mapped: WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), WICcash (Women, Infants, and Children cash benefit), SFMNP (Seniors’ Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program), and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), each of which is a separate benefits program.
The distribution of each can be seen below, in order from most widely accepted to least:
Women, Infants, and Children
Seniors’ Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Women, Infants, and Children cash benefit
As evidenced by the geospatial map of the payment data, the acceptance of benefits is relatively evenly distributed in relation to the prevalence of farmers’ markets.
As expected, the prevalence of markets is clustered near cities, with the highest density being unsurprisingly in New York City, and then there is a spattering of markets in more rural areas as well. The dense clustering that appears to go straight across the middle of the state from East to West encompasses Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
The simultaneous representation of all five payment methods and their acceptance, with the upper layer depicting acceptance and the lower non-acceptance:
The data presented here show that multiple markets are clustered around the same locations and there is a relatively even distribution of markets that accept benefits and markets that don’t. Given this result, it is safe to say that the accessibility of farmers’ markets to economically disadvantaged people is strong, and will likely grow stronger.
In order to accept benefits as payments, markets must register and become licensed by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) to accept benefits.
The Kernel Density Plot below shows the binary representation of the accepted to the not-accepted ratio of each payment method:
Accepting benefits is on the rise due in part to the availability of technology that makes electronic payment processing easy and convenient, as well as the added market share that it provides access to. It provides low-income people with more options for affordable, healthy food, and it serves to support local farms and producers. Overall, it’s really a win-win.
Results
The results of this data visualization show that the assumption that farmers’ markets are inaccessible to low-income Americans is patently false. The data supports the notion that there is a roughly even ratio between markets that accept benefits and those that do not. Furthermore, the geospatial distribution demonstrates that the markets are evenly spread, and thus no single region is either over or under-represented in terms of the prevalence of markets accepting benefits, with respect to the number of extant markets in a given vicinity.
Data sourced from:
Workflow:
Date published: June 25th 2020
