Faces of a Farmer’s Market [AUDIO]

It’s a Wednesday morning in late February, and a light ocean mist rolls over Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica. It’s the city’s weekly downtown farmers’ market, and local vendors have set up booths or tents in the street to sell their fresh produce from all over Southern California. The festivities span almost two bustling city blocks, with the roaring tides of the Pacific Ocean just a short walk away. As a crowd forms throughout the morning, the sound of small talk and side conversations fills the air, with street musicians soundtracking the brisk, foggy morning.

As Media Milwaukee journalists roam around the market, they find different stories and perspectives in the people who call this place home. After the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires ravaged through the Los Angeles metro area on January 8th, this market not only saw an impact on their clientele but on their community. Persisting through this unforeseen tragedy, the market continues to fight for their businesses and their own emotional losses. 

“We have a lot of farmers at this market, as you can tell. This is a pretty large market, got about 70 vendors, maybe 75 vendors here.”

That’s Jaclyn Rivera-Krouse, the lead organizer and manager of the market. She recounts the first day that the Palisades fire began to start its rampage, when the evacuation line was up to Montana Avenue in Santa Monica – only six blocks away from the market.

“We were here that Wednesday morning, January 8th.” 

Rivera-Krouse says that many of the market’s vendors grow their produce at California farms much further away from LA, so many of them didn’t know what to expect when news broke of the blaze.

“I think some of them didn’t realize the impact when we first had to cancel the market, and once they saw the smoke and the flames, they were like, ‘oh yeah, that’s pretty bad.’”

The impending effects of the nearby fire did lead Rivera-Krouse and her team to make some difficult decisions.

“So we closed that one Wednesday, January 8th. That was tough because the two prior weeks were Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, so we had been closed those two weeks – this is three weeks in a row. We did close our weekend market, so we have three markets on the weekend: one that’s here in downtown, one at Pico in Cloverfield, and one that Sunday on Main Street. So those were all preemptively closed on Thursday the 9th, just due to air conditions.”

When the market did open its doors again, emotions were running high, but the sense of community was intact through it all.

“We were back up and running the next week. It was pretty sad. Some people were really happy and grateful, I’ve had a customer that I’ve sometimes not seen eye to eye with, and she came right up and said ‘thank you for being here,’ so she was really happy to be, you know, in kind of her community space. I know we definitely had some farmers that still didn’t feel comfortable, we had some farmers that had issues getting to market still, not too many, but most of them were here – but it was pretty slow.”

That was about a month and a half ago. Things aren’t back to normal yet here, but every week marks a new chapter in rebuilding.

“The weeks following have been slower, definitely. There are a lot of customers that came from the Palisades region and we’re feeling that impact, and we’ll have to see kind of how long that progresses.”

There is one thing that continues to inconvenience Rivera-Krouse and her vendors – the Pacific Coast Highway is still closed to the public. Not only does the closure cut off some of their customer base, it’s been difficult for farmers to easily access the market.

“We have different vendors that are very late every day that aren’t usually late, like ‘ah darn it, I’m stuck on the 405 again, I’m not used to this,’ so it has been really challenging for them getting to market. I think just having that lack of access to customers has been really challenging.”

Despite it all, Rivera-Krouse recognizes that the market will continue to play a pivotal role in her community, even if it looks a little different than it used to. However, she says the farmers have been feeling the fire’s lingering effects harder than anyone else.

“A lot of them rely on the restaurant business and doing those relationships with pre-orders, and because a lot of the restaurants have also been slow, they’ve seen those orders drop out a little bit too. So it’s been tough. I think that we’re starting to see a little bit more – like today looks fantastic. There’s a lot of foot traffic today, one of the first weeks we’re starting to look a little bit more normal.”

Reporters continued walking up and down the market’s streets, talking to local vendors and farmers along the way.

“It’s definitely picking up now that it’s the end of February, moods are changing, things are feeling a little better, people are coming back out to shop more, but for sure January was, like, depressing.”

That’s a farmer’s market worker named Sarah, working at a booth for a farm in Paso Robles – about three and a half hours north of LA. She’s been selling the farm’s European-style greens at the Santa Monica market for four years now.

“It just seemed like people were all over the place and not knowing what to do. Just very lost, we want to help our neighbors, we want to help our friends and people who lost things, but we also have to carry on. We have to go to work ourselves, we have to take care of our own families. So yeah, it felt like people were just dispersed and scattered and displaced, and kind of just not knowing week to week what it was going to be like.”

Talking to customers week after week, Sarah has observed first-hand how Santa Monica and its surrounding communities have attempted to rebound from the fires and their wide-reaching effects.

“A lot of the customers who do shop here regularly are displaced right now. They’re not staying at home, they’re not cooking as much as home, probably ordering out more. Yeah, some things have slowed down for sure. And the restaurants that shop from us have been affected, a lot of the restaurants were donating meals and stuff for free, and so not buying as much of our produce. So yeah, it was hard for the smaller farms.”

That being said, these hard times for the farm have reminded Sarah why she loves showing up to this market every week.

“The community of people, the regulars who always come out – it’s surprising how many regulars make it a point to come every Wednesday to shop. Customers I know by name now, and like, they have my phone number. They were calling me, checking in on me.”

Walking across the street, reporters get a similar story of community resilience from another vendor.

“It was difficult, I mean, I lost four days of work that would usually be on my paycheck. We make a decent amount of our weekly profit at this market because it is one of the biggest ones that we go to. So it was a big impact, and I think we’re still seeing the effects, honestly – even this week, because there’s so many customers displaced.”

That’s a vendor named Abigail, she works for Apricot Lane Farms. They’re a biodynamic farm based in Moorpark, about an hour outside of LA in Ventura County, growing over a hundred different types of fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers over 234 acres of land. She says they’ve vended at this market for years.

“I would say that just barely, we’re getting to the point of bouncing back – the amount of people that have been here has been very little, you know, the roads are closed, and even just at our farm, we were getting ashes from other fires dropping on the crops, and making us have to evacuate the farm for poor air quality. It’s a scary experience, and I think it’s really affected the city as a whole.”

Walking around more, volunteers are seen with clipboards trying to talk to people around the market. Matt was one of those people. Matt works for the ASPCA, a non-profit organization that saves animals from abusive situations as well as disaster relief. 

“We save animals from abusive situations, we do disaster relief, and anytime there is a natural disaster, we go out to save all the animals that go missing or reunite them with their families. We give the families medicine or food to take care of their animals. A lot of good work. We’re a non-profit. We’re out here fundraising in general. The biggest crisis is the LA fires, it would go to that. We try to build the account so we have the money prepared whenever a disaster happens. There have been so many natural disasters going on right so we’ve kinda been scraping by. But ever since COVID, we lost a lot of our memberships. We’ve been just trying to rebuild it.” 

Even though Matt was trying to look for more people to sign up to donate, he mourns what was lost in the LA fires as he had grown up around the Altadena area, which unfortunately some parts were lost to the Eaton fires. He reminisces on old spots he used to go to with his friends. 

“I remember Rancho Bar, a bar in Altadena, a bar me and my friends would go to and unfortunately, that is gone now. It was a cool dive bar where we went to play pool. There would be live music there, sometimes there were cool little posts. It was a spot you went to. It was one of those spots where you met up with your friends from high school. I’m sure there are other ones, but I haven’t gone back.” 

Matt believes that even though the LA fires took a big toll on the Altadena area, that their strong community will get them through these next couple of months. 

“They were generational homes lost in the fire. Altadena was the first real black community in California. It hits a little harder when you realize what the community meant. Altadena is a very tight-knit community, they will rise from the ashes. Pasadena is a very strong community. I grew up around there and went to high school there, and a lot of focus on doing good. I believe in them.” 

Isa was another vendor who, even though wasn’t directly affected, was afraid. Isa works for Burkart Organics, an organic farm that grows and sun-dries a variety of seasonally grown fruits. Having moved here 5 years ago from Brazil, Isa had never seen wildfires like these ones. 

“It was scary, so I only live with my boyfriend. I don’t have any family here, so one day they sent an evacuation order for all of LA County, so I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’ I’m all alone because I don’t have anywhere to go.”

Not being directly affected herself, she had friends who lost their homes to the fires.

“I do have a friend. He lost his house in the Altadena/Pasadena fires. He had two kids, and they had to evacuate at like 8 p.m. He came back five hours later, and he couldn’t even find his street cause he couldn’t recognize it. But one thing that I saw that was very positive was that people were willing to help. They did fundraisers for him, and they raised like $30,000. A lot of people volunteered, especially in the Santa Monica area. I go to Santa Monica College, and we had a lot of volunteers there, a lot of food donations, so that was a really good sign. A lot of people were willing to help.” 

The positive connections and community that the people of LA have built after the fires has been carrying peoples hope and optimism even after a month after the fires ravaged through their communities. Shopping for produce and seeing familiar faces, smiling and making friendly conversation brings not only this market together but the people. 

“It was scary, even though we weren’t affected, it was scary thinking of the people affected. Sometimes, it’s not about your belongings, it’s about your memories and the places you used to hang out with your friends. People were more positive than I would have thought.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into the 2025 California wildfires. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club.