Oh, I forgot to mention one other weird thing: this isn't just liberals. There is a frightening large contingency of white supremacists who are into this, and a few showed up at Portland farmers market until they were outed. Regardless of how you feel about having racist nationalists selling next to hippies, self-sufficiency is quite a thing up here.
Hah! No, it's not. I was playing on stereotypes. There is a stereotype that local farmers-markets are for "liberal hippie" people (see: the television sitcom "Portlandia").
Based on my travels to other countries, local farmers markets are simply called "markets" and there is nothing unusual about them. In the USA, small local markets and co-ops are a fringe thing because we are fed almost entirely by industrial farming through vast supply chains that terminate at enormous multi-purpose grocery stores.
I may have a few facts wrong, but this consolidation started after WWII, and local food co-ops were considered liberal operations because it was "liberal hippies" who were opposed to the industrialization of food.
Seeing extremely far right subsets embracing what has generally been considered far left behavior is just amusing.
