It’s farmers market season, so we’re revisiting this conversation with Shelby Wild, whose work in Lompoc shows how a weekly neighborhood market can reshape a community’s food system. This rerun highlights the deep local relationships, creative partnerships, and small-scale innovations that make markets like Route One a backbone of local resilience and access to good food.
Shelby Wild is a mom, lifelong gardener, and executive director of Route One Farmers Market in her hometown of Lompoc, California, which she started in 2018 after her neighborhood farmer’s market closed. The market runs every Sunday and is currently the only one within 50 miles on the central coast of California that offers both EBT and Market Match.
Wild and her team strive to make the market a place that brings together the diverse communities that call Lompoc home. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the market to be the first in the area to offer produce bags for curbside, contactless pickup, distributing hundreds of bags of local food to those under shelter-in-place restrictions. They’ve also launched the region’s first mobile farmer’s market, a next step in making local food part of everyday life in Lompoc.
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. Today I'm joined by Shelby Wild. She's a mom, a lifelong gardener, and executive director of Route One Farmers Market in her hometown of Lompoc, California, which she started in 2018 after her neighborhood farmers market closed.
As both a traditional farmers market and a nonprofit, Shelby's goal is to increase access and break down barriers to local food in California's Lompoc Valley. The market runs every Sunday and is currently the sole market for 50 miles of the central coast of California that offers customers both EBT and Market Match. Shelby and her team strive to make the market a place that brings together the diverse communities that call Lompoc home.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shelby led her market to be the first in the area to offer a produce bag for curbside, contactless pickup for all customers, distributing hundreds of bags of local food to those under shelter-in-place restrictions. Last year, they launched the first-ever mobile farmers market in Santa Barbara County. Just recently, Shelby was honored as Woman of the Year by her local Chamber of Commerce at their annual awards banquet. Shelby, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. What a lovely introduction.
I felt very nervous about saying the name of your city. I realized I'm kind of insecure about pronouncing it.
That's okay. It is actually Lompoc — but anyone who doesn't live here doesn't know that, so I apologize.
I should have put it in my notes as "Lompoc" phonetically. I'm really excited to talk with you. I thought we could start off with some fun questions — partly, I'm going to live vicariously through you, because I attempted to garden this year and it lasted maybe a day and a half of weeding and it didn't go much further. So you love to garden. What are you planting this year? What have you planted? What are you growing now? What are you excited about?
Well, weeding is not the fun part — I agree with that for sure. But I focus mostly on native plants because that's my passion, and doing things that are the most ecologically responsible feels like the right move. I love getting native plants to thrive in my old yard, which is going on almost 70 years old in this neighborhood. Doing things slightly differently than my neighbors — just seeing the native wildlife come to life and the bees come around — that's what really brings me joy.
Do you have one of those cool front yards that's totally different from everyone else's?
I think it's cool, but my neighbors with lawns probably don't agree.
I love that. There's a house not far from where I live here in Waco. Every spring they — I guess they figured out how to plant a wildflower hedge or something. They basically use part of their front yard as a wildflower field. I'm a major fan. I would love it if everyone planted wildflowers.
I love the No Mow May movement and anything that's getting our pollinators fed is so important.
Are you planting anything for food?
I have a lot of herbs. I'm pretty lucky having access to the veggies at the market, so I focus on herbs and natives and flowers. I have some grapes and some fruit trees.
What's your favorite herb?
Oh my gosh — basil at this time of year, definitely. But sage, yeah. They're all good. I'm also obsessed with dill.
What is it about dill? Something magical?
Yes, it really is.
I'm going to be brave and actually say the name of your city. You live in a small city in California called Lompoc — said it right — which I suspect most people haven't heard of, and you've lived there all your life. Can you tell us a little bit about your city? What makes it unique? What do you love? What's it like living in your hometown? I feel like we have a good mix on the show of people who have moved to other cities, but also some people who have really stayed put in the community they're from. Tell us about your city.
I'd be happy to. I love Lompoc. It's a unique little town. It's right on Point Conception — if you look at a map of California, it sticks out a little bit. We're right on that pointy end. That's where Vandenberg Space Force Base is located, and we're centrally located — it's a two-hour drive to LA and a five-hour drive to San Francisco. Mountains nearby, ocean ten miles away. We have amazing resources all around us, and it's a beautiful, agricultural-based town.
We were the location where the shuttle was going to be launched from on the west coast before the Challenger disaster, and that affected our growth a lot. It's just a wonderful, quirky, unique town. I love it.
What would you say are some of the challenges right now in your city?
We have a diverse population, so it's not always easy to get everybody on the same page or feel like we're really effectively communicating throughout. There's always these barriers to communicating with everyone effectively. We've had some halt of growth. We're also one of the newer places that has embraced cannabis open-armed, so there's a lot of interesting new development that brings people who love it and people who don't. There's a lot going on, a lot to navigate.
I feel like this is an interesting backdrop to the farmers market — seeing it as a place where all different kinds of people can come together in sort of a third space, which we'll talk about in a bit. But before we jump into that, can you tell us about your journey with the gardening world and how you came to run a farmers market?
Sure — it wasn't exactly a straight line. I've always been fascinated with the natural world and growing plants. I was a teenager spending my allowance on plants to plant in the ground, which none of my friends were doing. It's just something that's been with me my whole life, and I tend to work best when I'm around something I'm passionate about.
I worked in schools and did a term in AmeriCorps, thinking I wanted to go into education. Then I had my daughters and stayed home with them until they were in preschool. Right around the time my youngest was starting preschool, a job opportunity came up to be a garden educator — not even a job I knew existed when I was in high school, nothing I had considered a career path. I got to do that for seven years and loved it. I still think that playing in the dirt with kids is one of the best jobs you can have.
I started working closely with the farmers market in my neighborhood that was supporting education in that area, and that's what got me into the farmers market sector. It fit perfectly with my passions around food and plants, so it was a natural progression.
So you were working at one farmers market — tell me if I have this correct — and then that one closed in 2018?
Yes. I was working just kind of as a volunteer, supporting them doing outreach with kids, because that was my wheelhouse. It was a great little place. It did a good job while it was there and the community liked it. I actually started contracting with a partner to support the farmers markets and expand food access with EBT and Market Match. So by 2018 I was contracting and working with a more concerted effort toward supporting markets — and then that one just closed for internal reasons.
Can you flesh out a little bit the food access situation in your city? For someone like me who isn't really involved in the local food supply conversation, can you clarify how a city that is an agricultural hub could have issues accessing local food?
It doesn't really make sense, and people are usually surprised to hear that. I read a couple of books while staying home with my kids — Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver was a big one. She takes a pretty deep dive into what local means and why it matters to us and our planet, and it got me very motivated to shop local. I found that the closest CSA — community-supported agriculture — was 50 miles away, so according to Barbara, that's not even local. That was eye-opening.
We're surrounded by agricultural lands that raise cattle, and yet you couldn't buy locally raised or farmed beef. Digging into that and trying to figure out why — being surrounded by ag and not being able to buy it — was pretty interesting. It really comes down to the way the system has evolved into supporting big grocery stores and big ag.
Is it that what's being produced has to be shipped out to other clients they're servicing? What's playing into that?
A lot of things. Most of it is that the larger growers want larger contracts, so they're only going after those bigger grocery store contracts. Smaller growers can't get those big contracts, so they're in this precarious position of wanting to grow but potentially not being able to sell it. If you don't have other platforms for local sales, you're faced with the question of how they're going to be sustained and keep growing.
In Santa Barbara County, we're usually in the top 15 or 16 in production for the whole state. We did something like almost $2 billion in agricultural production in our county last year alone. So a huge amount of food is being grown. But when you go to some of these bigger farmers and ask where you can buy their strawberries or broccoli, I've literally been told by a farmer, "Our broccoli goes to Japan, and we're the top strawberry producer for Indiana" — and he can't sell them locally at his farm.
This is really helpful, because when I hear the phrase "improving access to local food," I mostly think about the consumer side. But it sounds like what you're saying is that the other side to the access issue is also providing access for smaller farmers who want to sell to the local community — actually providing that platform for them to do so.
Yes, exactly. Our mission is equally to support the farmers in their ability to access the community and the community's ability to access them. The in-between spaces that don't tend to exist locally for us are really what's needed, because the farmers are doing amazing things and the community wants to buy it. But there are still few places where those two things come together.
I want to ask you more about the market, but I also want to ask what might seem like a dumb question: can you make the case for shopping local or for local food supply? From everything you've researched and learned, if you had to give your elevator speech on why this is something we should care about — or at least be curious about — what would you say?
Definitely. It hits all sectors of being a responsible consumer. Shopping at a farmers market — which is my wheelhouse — the food is often harvested within a day before it gets to market. On a nutritional level, it's harvested at the peak of the season, it's not processed at all, it's barely transported any distance, and you're eating it within a day or two of harvest, which is when it has its highest nutritional content. It's also fresh, so it tastes better, and it's often easier to get people to integrate that kind of food into their diet because it's actually delicious — not stuff that's potentially been in a box on a truck for who knows how long and treated to look red but not really taste good.
At our market, we have only one vendor that travels farther than 35 miles from our location, so the environmental impact of shipping is minimal to none — we have farmers that drive five miles to us. When you spend money at a farmers market, you are literally putting your dollars in the hands of the farmers, so your money is staying within your local economy rather than going to a corporation or big box store. You also often get to see the people who grow the food, so you get to make a real community connection. If you aren't familiar with something, they will very passionately tell you about the vegetables, because they grew them themselves. It's a full-circle, best choice for feeding your body, supporting your local economy and ecology, and building community.
It also sounds like there's the potential for a real relationship there. I worked at our farmers market here in Waco for about a year, helping a neighbor who makes baby and hair accessories — so I wasn't on the food side — but I got to know the meat vendors next to us. There's just the potential for getting to know the farmers, and also for observing a whole rhythm of life around food. The seasonal aspect always gets me — everyone gets so excited when the peach table shows up. It's like, ah, it's time for peaches.
But then there are all the stories. The meat farmer that worked next to me one day showed up with a baby lamb they called Wild Thing that they had to nurse, so they brought her to the farmers market, and she was bleating the whole time while everyone came over to say hi. There's so much about their world and their process that you get to learn a little bit about, rather than just running to the meat aisle in a grocery store and grabbing whatever's on sale. It introduces you to a whole world, not just a product.
It does. It's as close as you can get to your food system outside of growing it in your backyard. It really is a community. I personally get really excited when English shelling peas show up in the spring. We don't have very extreme seasons here on the coast of California, but it's the little things.
When you tap into what it actually takes to grow the food we eat — how much work goes into running a farm, harvesting, and doing markets — I have a vendor that does seven markets a week in six days. She has one day off. She works harder than almost anybody I know. If we didn't support her in her sales, she wouldn't be able to do it. She's doing such amazing, important work and growing beautiful things.
I would actually argue you might be more connected at a farmers market than if you're growing it yourself, because you have a community around it. Community happens at all levels at the market — neighbors shopping, people passionate about their food connecting, education and recipes and ideas around what's growing. It's a constant conversation and enthusiasm for food. A big takeaway of that is that we're all being enthusiastic about doing something that's good for us, that's feeding us, that's good for our environment. There are just so many layers to why I believe it's really important to support.
Tell me more about the market. What makes Route One Farmers Market unique?
We've really tried to go in with a lot of intention toward being for everyone. We have partners who have done research, and we've done some of our own, that shows there's a stigma around people believing farmers markets are for a certain crowd but not for them — that they might not be accessible for lots of reasons, and some of those concerns are actually valid. We are open limited hours. But what we can bring is that community and connection piece.
We have the first CalFresh navigator in our town — really in our county — who is there specifically to represent the market, to do outreach to customers, to greet them in English or Spanish, to help them literally navigate the market, and to help them use their incentives if they have EBT or WIC. We recognize that accessibility can only go so far if you're not meeting people in the language they speak or at the level they come with. So we try to offer a lot of education around what's in season and why it matters. That focus on supporting both the farmers and the community is our mission — and that's what makes us us.
I know that partnerships are a big part of how you approach your work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Definitely. We are born of partnerships in our town. The focus on farmers markets in Lompoc came from our partners at the Lompoc Valley Community Healthcare Organization — LVCHO — who are running a HEAL cabinet. Lompoc is a HEAL city, meaning it has adopted the focus of considering healthy eating and active living in all aspects of city life. There was a cabinet around what that means, how to guide it, and what was needed. The need to support the farmers markets we had at the time and make them more accessible was born out of that cabinet. A grant from LVCHO, received from our Santa Barbara Foundation, actually hired me to start looking into that work, so we literally would not be here without them.
Through all of the work it took to get where we are, having the Healthy Lompoc Coalition — also run by LVCHO — which is a coalition of partnerships in healthy living, community services, nonprofits, and healthcare, and being able to lean on those partnerships has really given us the foundation we needed to grow.
I think that's really important to think about — the role that partnership, as an approach or as an attitude, plays in anything anyone is trying to do to make their city better. It's such a good reminder to consider the power of partnering not just with other neighbors, but with nonprofits, with churches, or even with folks who work in city government. Considering what partnership could look like and whether we could go further together.
Of course there will be situations where you might have to keep moving forward on your own and the partnerships might evolve later. But I think there can be a tendency — and I'll speak for myself — to forget that I don't have to do it all on my own. I might notice this thing, but I might not be the one to be at the front lines of solving it. Maybe there's someone else already working on this problem, someone with better skills or more connections. Maybe one way of thinking about it is not that I have to solve it, but that I have to find other people who care about it, and maybe there could be a partnership and we could solve it together.
I so agree with that. We didn't get here alone or by my work alone — we are only here because of our partnerships. I would encourage people in more traditional settings like healthcare or county public health to think about this too. You can't necessarily go out and start a farmers market, but maybe you can reach out and support some programming. You can't necessarily start a mobile farmers market, but you can partner with one on a grant to help get some funds that mutually benefit both of your goals. There's a lot of strategic organizing that our partners have really brought to us that has helped us get where we are.
It's very different from the siloed approach that I think has dominated the way cities work for so long. It's a good challenge to rethink that. Partnering is risky, though — you might have to compromise, negotiate, work with people who are super annoying.
It does open the door to things. But it's an opportunity, and if you have the capacity to navigate it, it can be so beneficial.
One of the things you all emphasize is being EBT and Market Match accessible. For folks who might not know what that means or why it's important, could you explain how that fits into your mission and how it helps you serve your community?
Definitely. EBT stands for Electronic Benefits Transfer — it's the program that used to be called Food Stamps. It's a government program that supports lower-income individuals and families in purchasing food. Market Match is an additional USDA-funded program that doubles their dollars, but only at farmers markets. So it's a special extra boost — something we can offer that Walmart can't, outside of all the wonderful things I've already said about farmers markets. Walmart is a one-stop shop and slightly more powerful than us little guys.
Walmart captures over 25% of SNAP dollars annually across the country, and with their budget in the hundreds of millions, that's a lot of money coming directly from government incentives. The national budget for SNAP — also called CalFresh in California, or supplemental nutrition assistance program — is over $100 billion nationwide. A lot of funds go toward this. What's exciting is that it can be spent at farmers markets, which means we can help those government funds go directly into farmers' pockets, keeping those dollars in the local economy instead of going to a corporation.
For our lower-income families, it's about food access — giving them the ability to purchase local food. With Market Match, right now we offer a $15 match: if they spend $15 on their EBT card, we double that and they get $30 to spend. We can do that every week.
I didn't really understand the behind-the-scenes workings of SNAP dollars and EBT before, so it's really helpful to understand the role those funds can play in your local economy. I had never put that together. Speaking of access and improving access, I know you all just started a mobile market. Can you tell me the inspiration behind that, and how it fits within your overall mission?
The truck is really about that access piece as well. Farmers markets are limited in their ability to get to everyone — it's usually once a week. We operate our traditional market one day a week, four hours that day, and not everyone can walk there or get off work that day. There are a lot of conflicts to attending a farmers market, even if you have the best intentions. Farmers are also pretty maxed out — I mentioned Edith, who goes to seven markets a week. They can't take on much more.
So for us, the next solution was not to open another market that requires our farmers to attend and give up a whole day's work, but to launch this truck that basically does it for them. We source from them, load up our truck, drive it around town, and park it at partner locations — public health offices, the hospital, things like that. We sell the exact same food, take EBT, and offer a 50% discount through Market Match. It takes that food out into the community where it isn't otherwise accessible and gets it in front of people who need a little more support.
How would you describe the relationship between local food supply, farmers markets, and the overall health or resilience of a city? I know that's a bit on-the-spot. For someone who might say, "Farmers markets are nice, but we should really be working on parking minimums and improving housing supply" — sometimes it might be easier to see the connection between affordable housing or zoning reform and city resilience than it is to connect farmers markets to that same conversation. This is your chance to make that case.
I can speak to Lompoc in particular. We are hugely impacted by the infrastructure of our food system in terms of what's accessible to us. There were mudslides south of us in Montecito in 2018 that blocked the major highway feeding north into our area, and we had empty grocery shelves for days, just because the connection to Los Angeles was blocked. If there are no platforms where local food can be purchased, you can't maintain that lack of supply for very long before people start to struggle — and everybody needs to eat.
We also have two main access points to our town over old bridges, so if there were an issue with either of those, the supply chain would be cut off immediately. If we didn't have an internal supply chain where locals could access local food, we would be in much bigger trouble. I think a lot of towns probably haven't been developed with that thought in mind.
That's helpful. I saw a little picture of that my first winter here in Waco, with the crazy Texas blizzard. It was insane in terms of how vulnerable the city felt. If you didn't have a car — and we only have maybe three major grocery locations here, and they're not centrally located in neighborhoods, they're all places you have to drive to — people were having to put themselves on these dangerous, icy roads to get to the store, and things were selling out like crazy.
I think I'm kind of revealing how saturated I am in a world where everything just always feels like it'll always be there. Then you have these experiences where you realize: people used to have food in their backyard, not a ten-minute drive away being shipped in from everywhere. Part of the resilience conversation really should include food.
We saw that during the pandemic, with how broken the supply chain was. If you aren't somewhere where food is being grown, that's a completely different issue. But also, if you think about the bigger system — in Santa Barbara County, 90 to 95 percent of what's grown here is shipped out of our county. When you think about the tax that has on the overall system, how much gas is being used for that alone — that's a huge amount of money and resources spent shipping food in and out of our county, and we can't be alone in that. Solving an issue at this level could put more resources toward solving other problems. It could benefit everybody.
I also think of markets as a proxy for social resilience. Going back to how markets can function as a third space where people build loose ties, get to know their neighbors, get to know local business owners, get to know local farmers — there's something really valuable in the social export from a farmers market, the way it contributes to our overall sense of feeling connected and feeling like we can trust each other in the face of a crisis.
I agree. Farmers markets were places where sales and attendance actually went up during the onset of the pandemic, when everything else was being closed down. Luckily in California, our governor declared us essential and allowed us to stay open. People felt safer outside and could socially distance. When we were doing curbside pickup, I had a woman come up — socially distanced — in tears because she hadn't left her house in weeks and I was the first person she had seen. It's very moving.
There are concerns around how much time we spend on our devices and not connecting human to human, and you get real human connection at the market. So yes.
I can imagine running a market is magical, but I also know it's a lot of hard work. What are some of the challenges you face, and what keeps you motivated?
The challenges lately have been more around launching the mobile market and getting that system set up and sustainable. Being a new solution toward food access, there just aren't systems in place to support it yet. When you go to the county for a health permit, they don't have a health permit category for a mobile market, so you fill out a permit for a food truck and are held to the same regulations as someone processing chicken — and we don't even cut our vegetables. It's a very different food safety situation.
There are a lot of barriers. We're coming up with a relatively out-of-the-box solution but we're still being held in by systems that don't really recognize us for what we are. That's been a real challenge.
It sounds like an opportunity for some innovation and definitely a rethinking of rules and ordinances — taking into account the costs those can impose on entrepreneurs who are trying to help the city adjust and become more resilient for the long term.
Definitely. There are a lot of fees that can feel very punitive on a small business or nonprofit, toward development or construction or launching a business, that are really holding us back.
From a historical perspective, it's so interesting — I was talking to someone about this, and you realize when you read the history of zoning that at one point you can kind of see where they got a rule from. But then it just calcifies. The world around it has changed so much, the needs of the community have changed, but these old rules and regulations and fee schedules don't align with the reality of what's needed now, or where the pressure points are, or how the community has evolved. It seems like we need a more evolutionary, agile attitude about how regulations work.
I would agree with that. There are so many innovations being made and new ideas that could solve big problems. Obviously the systems the old policies are supporting aren't working — that's why things change. So maybe the policies need to change too.
Well, I ask this question of everyone at the end of our podcast — it's probably one of my favorite parts of the interview. If someone was coming to spend a couple of hours or a day in your city, which local spots or businesses would you recommend they visit?
Oh my gosh. If you're here on a Sunday, please come say hi at the market. But we have such a beautiful region. We're pretty famous for our wine in the Santa Rita Hills, so there are beautiful wine tasting rooms and vineyards where you can soak up the sun and really enjoy the land.
We are the City of Arts and Flowers. We actually have a whole mural society, many murals all over town, an art alley, a guided mural walk you can do, and a beautiful little gallery with local artists. If it's a Tuesday, we like to go to our Cold Coast Brewing Company for trivia night — that's a favorite of my team. We have a beautiful farm, one of our farm partners Dare to Dream, where you can Airbnb and literally soak up the land and stay there with your family. There's a beach — Jalama Beach is famous for surfing. There are trails, there's La Purisima Mission. I'm pretty passionate about my area, so I could go on.
What about a favorite coffee shop?
Southside Coffee for sure.
Well, thank you so much, Shelby. I'm glad we were able to chat. It was great to hear your story and to hear more about what you're doing in Lompoc — said it right! Thank you to our audience for listening to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution. We'll put show notes giving you more information about Route One Farmers Market, about Shelby Wild, and some of the businesses and destinations she recommended.
If there's someone you think would make a great guest for our show who's doing some awesome work in their community, please use the suggested guest form in the show notes to nominate them — that's actually how we discovered Shelby. Thanks to whoever nominated her. We really appreciate it, and we'll be back in two weeks with another conversation.
Thanks so much for having me. It was really great to connect.