California has the most robust and heavily-regulated farmers' market system in the nation. New laws that went into effect in 2015 increase the requirements and penalties on California's direct marketing farmers - including potential jail time or civil penalties.
To assist farmers in understanding and complying with these laws, this project has developed and distributed multilingual compliance guides to over 300 farmers who sell in farmers' marekts in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project will also train 75 specialty crop farmers on direct marketing regulations through a series of half-day workshops, repeated in three different locations around the state. Collaborative partners will assist in the guide distribution, reaching over 1,000 farmers statewide.
To further increase the impact of this project, simple subject-specific compliance guides will be developed and two train-the-trainer sessions will be conducted with 30 farmers' market managers who agree to use the guides to then train at least 10 farmers. This will result in 300 farmers individually trained in these essential compliance issues.