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LAUREN: I’m Lauren Schugar, and today we’re going to the Farmers Market.
>> DOUG: My name is Doug Taylor. I’m the executive pastry chef for Mario Batali here
in Las Vegas. I’m also the instructor at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension
for the Farmer to Chef program. We started the market about eight—9 months ago, and
it’s a wonderful success. >> LAUREN: Can you tell us a little bit about
how you got this up and running? >> DOUG: Our goal was to find better food
because the stuff that was being trucked in from California and around the country…it
wasn’t ripe. It wasn’t good, and it was making our job really hard.
>> LAUREN: So are all the farmers in your market, are they a two-and-a-half or two hour’s
drive? >> DOUG: Within a two-hour drive, yah, from
Downtown Las Vegas. >> LAUREN: Wow.
>> DOUG: Most of them are growing in a natural element. A few of them are hydroponic or in
greenhouses, but most of them are outside. We started it to open it up to chefs because
we thought that was where—that everyone would want what we wanted as restaurateurs—but
we didn’t get the response that we wanted, so we decided to open it up to the public
and see what they would want, and it’s been pretty good. We average around 200 people
per week. >> LAUREN: One of the reasons I actually love
coming here is because it’s not very busy, and when it is, it comes in shifts since it’s
only so short. But I have found that when I stroll in here around 12:30, a lot of the
good produce is gone or they’ll run out of stuff.
>> DOUG: Yah, yah, but the cool thing is—being here unlike a grocery store or somewhere else—is
that once you get to know the farmers, you can say, “Hey, I’m gonna want a dozen
oranges next week,” and they’ll put them to the side for you. You know? Or whole boxes,
or whatever you want. And, so then you can come in whenever you want, pick it all up,
and it’s almost like preordered for yourself. >> LAUREN: So when you come to the Farmers
Market, bring your own bags because I believe that they’re not provided. And you kind
of just walk along the line, and you pick out all the produce that you want, and then—towards
the end—you go to the register, and you pay!
>> DOUG: I think our ultimate goal is, is to have it be sustainable for the farmers
themselves. So that—almost as chefs—we kind of step out of it. In opening the doors,
maybe they can have their own facility, and they can run it themselves at some place.
We’re trying to work up a business model for them of some kind of co-op, company kind
of a thing, but it’s going to take some time.