Our mission is to unite families, communities, farmers, and food artisans year-round through good locally grown food.
We pursue this mission through our producer-only farmers’ markets. Since 2000, Farm to City has been a leader in the Philadelphia-area’s local food movement. We strive to connect the city and its suburbs to the surrounding rural areas through farmers and their crops. Together with community partners, we create a food-system where the family farm is economically successful and a force to preserve our vanishing countryside. We envision urban areas rich with healthful and flavorful food choices.
Our network of weekly, outdoor, producer-only farmers’ markets is the key element of that vision.
We operate our producer-only farmers’ markets based on these values:
Community
We establish markets that strengthen communities and urban-rural social and economic connections. Our markets are a place to meet your neighbors and the people who grow, raise, and make the food that you bring home for your family and friends.
Health
Products sold are safe and nutritious. Our markets offer freshly picked produce, sustainably raised meats, whole grain baked goods, and prepared foods made with locally produced ingredients.
Quality
Food items are of high quality and are produced using sustainable practices. We invite farmers to market who demonstrate good stewardship of their land resulting in low impact on the environment, who raise animals on pasture, and who use integrated pest management practices.
Authenticity
We strive to ensure that farmers who produce what they sell are present at every one of our markets. We do not allow resellers of highly processed food-like substances with dubious ingredients to sell at our markets. Our motto is “Real Farmers, Real Food.”
When you shop at our markets, you help us sustain our mission and values.
Thank you for your support.
The Farm to City Story
The Farm to City story begins with Bob Pierson, one of the pioneers of the Philadelphia-area local food movement.
Since the 1990s, he’s established over two dozen producer-only farmers’ markets in the area, operated a Winter Harvest Buying Club for many years, helped CSA farms to find thousands of members, and created a website that encouraged farmers and communities to create their own local food hubs.
Both of his parents were dedicated public servants - his father, a landscape architect and planner who started the Bucks County parks program and the Bucks County Conservancy now called the Heritage Conservancy; his mother, a school teacher who taught young Bob and his siblings how to explore the fields and woods, to turn over rocks, and to understand the web of life.
A home garden, weeks canning every summer, and eating together as a family, these are the food traditions that Bob grew up with.
“In the mid-1990s,” Bob remembers, “there were very few, if any, local farmers selling at outdoor markets on a regular basis. The Philadelphia-area food culture had been taken over by supermarkets getting their food mostly from national and international sources. Only a few local crops would make it to the city’s supermarkets, crops like peaches and corn.”
In 1996, he and several friends started Philadelphia's first outdoor farmers' market at South & Passyunk - a market with real farmers.
“My goal sounded so simple: keep farmers farming. But in order to do that, the farmers’ markets that they attend must be successful. The most successful markets have deep community involvement in all sectors – businesses, residents, government, and other institutions – and highly visible locations.”
Later that year, he began work with The Food Trust to plan and operate its first seven outdoor farmers' markets.
In 2000, he left The Food Trust to start his own business, Farm to City, to be an advocate for farmers.
Since then, Farm to City has opened many new farmers' markets.
In 2004, he worked with a Philadelphia City Council attorney to craft a new section in the City Code for regulation of farmers’ markets to allow for the opening of the Rittenhouse Farmers’ Market. In 2005, the City extended this law to all farmers’ markets on public land.
The Philadelphia Inquirer called Bob “the father of Philadelphia farmers’ markets”. That same year, the local magazine GRID included Bob as one of the “fantastic four who brought farm fresh food to our city”.
In 2022, Farm to City's programs accounted for over $8 million annual sales by farmers and food artisans.
Bob is also co-founder of the Common Market, a wholesale distribution center for locally produced food that opened in 2008 in Philadelphia, now with facilities also in Atlanta, Houston, and Chicago.
In 2023, Farm to City operate 12 producer-only farmers’ markets; six of these open year-round. The purpose of these markets remain the same and still go back to the values Bob inherited from his family: to improve the economics of farming in the region so that small family farms succeed and their communities thrive.
“Know the sources of your food and the people who produce it,” Bob wrote. “Home cook your meals from fresh ingredients. Then sit down - often - to enjoy meals with your family and friends.”
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In 2023, Bob hired Katie Briggs as his successor to be director of Farm to City. He remains as an advisor.