The Downtown Visalia Certified Farmers Market is closing after years of operation, with its organizer citing mounting financial losses and prolonged disputes surrounding the market’s operations.

April Treona Lancaster announced the closure in a social media post Monday afternoon, saying she could no longer absorb the financial, professional, personal, and emotional costs associated with running the market.

“There comes a point when determination alone cannot make something sustainable,” Lancaster wrote. “I have reached that point.”

Lancaster said her documented losses connected to the market have exceeded $100,000, while other lost or impaired business, contractual, and program opportunities carried additional financial consequences.

She also said her lease had been threatened in connection with the market’s operations and that organizations with which she is affiliated had been contacted and questioned about their relationships with her or the market.

Lancaster attributed some of the difficulties to what she described as increasing regulatory and institutional challenges involving the city and others involved in downtown governance. She said those disputes eventually grew beyond the work of operating a farmers market.

Farmer’s Market Opened Opportunities, Organizer Said

Lancaster began her involvement with the Visalia Farmers Market as a vendor in 2015 and opened a storefront in 2017.

After the previous Downtown Market declined and eventually closed because of what Lancaster described as a financial burden on the Visalia Farmers Market Association, Lancaster sought permission from her board to revive the market under a new organizational structure.

Lancaster said the revived market sought to provide opportunities for farmers, artists and small businesses while bringing more visitors downtown and providing families with access to locally grown food.

She said the market also prioritized emerging and at-risk agricultural producers seeking access to direct-to-consumer sales.

Lancaster urged residents to continue supporting vendors who participated in the market by finding them at other farmers markets, following their businesses, and purchasing their products.

“Our vendors will now have to replace a reliable opportunity to sell directly to the public,” Lancaster wrote. “Some are established businesses. Others are tiny businesses, beginning farmers, food producers, artists, and makers for whom every viable market opportunity matters.”

Lancaster thanked the vendors, farmers, artists, merchants, musicians, employees, volunteers, and customers who participated in the market over the years.

“Most of all, thank you to the thousands of people who came Downtown and made the Market feel alive,” she wrote.

Lancaster said she did not consider the years spent building the market wasted despite its closure.

“We proved what was possible,” she wrote. “For several years, on Thursday evenings in the heart of Visalia, farmers, makers, merchants, families, musicians, neighbors, and small businesses came together and created something that belonged to our community.”

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