The Tower Grove Farmers' Market is an organization founded to pursue the following goals:
To give growers and producers of Missouri and Illinois agricultural commodities and other farm-related products alternative marketing opportunities.
To promote the sale of Missouri and Illinois-grown farm products.
To improve the variety, freshness, taste and nutritional value of produce available in the St. Louis area.
To make healthy, regionally produced foods accessible to lower-income residents.
To provide an educational forum for consumers to learn the uses and benefits of quality, locally grown or prepared food products.
To enhance the quality of life in the St. Louis area by providing a community activity which fosters social gathering and interaction.
Sustainable agriculture and urban education are of key interest to us:
In the U.S., our food travels an average of 1300 miles to get to our tables. This long-distance transport burns large amounts of fossil fuels, pollutes our air and our waters, and clogs our highways, waterways, airways and even our city streets with large food distribution transport vehicles. Local food systems offer an energy-efficient, sustainable, and less polluting alternative.
Regional farmland preserves open space and beautiful natural landscapes in the St. Louis region and helps to control suburban sprawl and commercial development in surrounding areas, thereby contributing to a vastly improved environment for St. Louis region citizens.
Farmers markets and local food systems build community ties and encourage civic life, offering urban residents a ‘small-town experience’ of buying produce directly from farmers, feeling connected to the land where their food is grown, and exercising consumer choice about how their food is grown.
Pesticides being used by large-scale conventional agriculture have toxic and polluting effects on the food, water, and air in our communities.
Sustainable agriculture addresses issues that concern urban residents; the preservation of open space, the survival of endangered species, the treatment of farm animals, the nutritional quality of the food they eat, the purity of our waterways, and biodiversity of plant and animal life. Building links with farmers offers urban residents a way to use their food dollars to directly support those practices that are most in keeping with their values and their ethical, political, and social concerns.
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