Buying the Farm?

From late March through the end of autumn, the Freshfarm farmers’ market draws produce-hungry Sunday crowds to Dupont Circle. Yet after six years of bounty, the American Farmland Trust (AFT), the District-based nonprofit that founded the market and runs it, may pull out. “It is a possibility,” AFT spokesperson Betsy Garside says. The group, she says, wants to focus on start-up markets elsewhere—and so could spin off the established Freshfarm operation into the hands of Bernadine Prince and Ann Harvey Yonkers, who currently manage it as AFT staffers. “[They] know the market,” Garside says. But they’ll have to run it without AFT’s considerable logistical and financial support. —Sarah Godfrey