Mallory Lynn Rahe

Farmers markets provide a direct‐to‐consumer marketing path for farmers and small businesses, facilitating customer discovery and product refinement. This paper explores farmers markets as a business incubator, with a focus on beginning vendors and resilience to a shock, namely, COVID‐19 market restrictions. We investigate how vendor sales vary by the type of products a vendor sells (farm products, processed food, and crafts/art), their attendance, market experience and the presence of COVID‐19 restrictions. We use a unique dataset of 9,371 sales observations from 399 vendors at five small to medium‐sized farmers markets in rural Oregon from 2019 to 2021. We estimate that beginning vendors have, on average, 11% lower sales than established vendors, holding other factors constant. Vendors’ sales, on average, were higher with higher market attendance. Results suggest that farm product vendors have higher sales than processed food and craft and art vendors, larger crowds encourage higher sales, and rainfall lowers sales, all else equal. Individual market day average vendor sales were, on average, 8.9% higher during days with COVID‐19 market restrictions than during days without restrictions, which was likely driven by experienced farm vendors.

Rural wealth creation is a salient approach to local economic development. This paper advances the implementation of this practice by documenting how targeted business investments within a value chain built multiple forms of wealth. We provide exploratory evidence of how consideration of value chain gaps, wealth-building opportunities, potential for expansion, and an emphasis on improved livelihoods can prioritize the allocation of resources to support businesses. We further show how modest investments into targeted businesses built multiple forms of wealth throughout a value chain. Our results provide examples of how to implement the rural wealth creation concepts and a refined understanding of how to target business assistance in ways that build multiple forms of community capital.

This paper examines the effects of income inequality on short-run changes in growth in the context of the most recent U.S. recession in both urban and rural counties. Resistance to job loss in the Great Recession is modeled as a function of local income inequality, controlling for community capital assets, and the size and structure of the local population and economy. Regression results suggest that the effect of local inequality on resilience depends on the size of a county’s population. High inequality increases the recessionary employment drop in counties with large populations but reduces the employment drop in the smallest counties.

JAFSCD: Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Publication of the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems

JAFSCD: Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Publication of the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems

Although leadership development programs are seen as key to equipping individuals with the tools to navigate the challenges facing their communities, there is relatively little evidence of their impact at the community level. In this paper, the evaluation findings of a rural leadership development program are situated within a framework of community change to illustrate the pathways of program impact. The analysis reveals that the program has increased the human capital and network resources of rural communities, and in most cases, this has resulted in increased community capacity. Some communities have gone on to experience additional environmental, social, and economic changes as a result of community processes that stemmed from the leadership program. The findings suggest that the evaluated leadership development program can serve as a model for efforts to build community capacity, but to realize more social, environmental, and economic changes, the scope of the program should do more to encourage residents to intentionally leverage their new capacity by engaging in processes to address community issues.