Oak Park Farmers Market closes. Organizers to maintain active role in community
For more than 15 years, the Oak Park Farmers Market has spanned McClatchy Park in Sacramento on Saturdays, and the market’s tents are now permanently coming down.
The market’s operators, the Food Literacy Center, announced Wednesday that the farmers market is ceasing operations, citing poor financial viability for the program and low traffic.
“We have struggled to bring customers back to the market, but also farmers,” said Food Literacy Center CEO Amber Stott in a social media announcement. “Without customers, very few farmers can afford to stay at the market. And without farmers, customers don’t come. It’s a cyclical problem.”
Oak Park Farmers Market in difficult economic times
The Oak Park Farmers Market launched in 2010, aiming to fill a gap in one of Sacramento’s underserved communities. At the time, the Oak Park community was a food desert, with extremely limited options for accessing fresh and healthy foods.
In 2023, the Food Literacy Center took over the market after it had temporarily closed, fundraising multiple years’ worth of budget from the community, including from then-assemblymember Kevin McCarty.
As part of the program, the Food Literacy Center — a Sacramento nonprofit that works to encourage low-income children to eat vegetables — has focused on supporting food stamp recipients. The market offered dollar-for-dollar sales matching up to $20 for EBT customers, thanks to its donors.
Three years after Oak Park Farmers Market was revitalized, it no longer meets the community’s needs and is straining the organization’s budget, Stott said in the announcement.
According to Stott, each week’s market costs $10,000 to run, and it was only reaching about 40 EBT customers per week. That comes out to a staggering cost of $250 per EBT customer, per week.
“The cost of food is high. Food budgets are very thin,” Stott said in the post. “In this current economic climate, this market is no longer the best solution to the problem of food insecurity in Oak Park.”
School programs, food drives have proven successful for the Food Literacy Center
With the funds previously earmarked for the farmers market, the organization said it plans to expand other more cost-effective programs in South Sacramento and the Oak Park area. The Food Literacy Center’s efforts in elementary schools are its strongest for reaching families in need, according to Stott’s announcement.
An after-school program helps young students across various Sacramento-area primary schools gain appreciation for produce, learn healthy cooking skills, understand nutrition labels and know the environmental impact of food choices, according to the Food Literacy Center’s website.
That program — which reportedly serves about 800 children weekly over 10-week programs — only costs the nonprofit about $16 per child, Stott said.
In addition to educating children in low-income communities, the Food Literacy Center hosts food distribution events at the elementary schools it serves. At these distributions, students are given free fresh produce to take home.
“Our families need free food right now. Even with the matching dollars we provided, budgets are stretched too thin,” Stott said in the center’s announcement. “Families have told us that our regular food distributions make a meaningful difference in their household budgets.”
Stott said the organization is using some of the redistributed funds to grow both the hands-on education programs and the food distribution events further.
“We are closing the market, but our commitment to combatting food insecurity continues,” Stott said.
This story was originally published January 14, 2026 at 4:41 PM.
.jpg)