Over the last 4 years, different students under the leadership of Jamie Renner at Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems took the questions and issues that NOFA-VT and FMC had collected over the years in order to research what markets had done in that situation and what the legal ramifications would be for each issue. Dozens of market leaders offered input and a few even let us go through their files or be interviewed to find case studies or to offer expert advice.

Now in 2018, we have a resource that we are all rightly proud to share with markets and vendors. The site is well laid out and offers enough detail to steer folks in the right direction and to assist their legal team in understanding what is available already and what are possible issues.

I hope that we can continue to build this toolkit in future iterations and expand on other questions raised since we began this project in 2014. Please let us all know how the toolkit is useful to you and how we might best increase its use if new funding comes our way.

https://farmersmarketlegaltoolkit.org/