Saturday Farmers’ Market Moves to Heart of Downtown Santa Barbara

Farmers had mixed feelings about their new digs at the Santa Barbara Farmers’ Market this Saturday. 

For BD Dautch of Ojai’s Earthtrine Farm, the move to State and Carrillo was bittersweet. He spent the last 40 years rooted at the former East Cota Street location, which is earmarked for the city’s new $103.7 million police station.

“With all the anxiety about it, I was like a kid you have to drag kicking and screaming, ‘No, no, I won’t go!’” Dautch said with a laugh. “But now that we’re here, it’s great — especially from the customer’s perspective, which is why we’re here.” 

It was challenging for farmers to work out the logistics of fitting their trucks and tables into their new space on the closed-off crossroads, but “the aisles are wide, and we got positive feedback,” Dautch explained. 

Other vendors, such as James Weston of Mt. Olive Organic Farms in Paso Robles, called the new spot “spacious” —- unlike Cota’s congested lot that often produced foot-traffic jams — and appreciated the increase in available parking, as well as the shade keeping people cool on that sunny Saturday morning.   

“Everything is running smoothly, but I miss the old spot,” Weston said. “One of the only cons is that they’re gonna chop down more than 30 trees at the old market during construction — I feel kind of bad about that.”   

Vendors were also dubious about the layout — an intersection of booths branching out in four different directions along State and East Carrillo streets — replacing Cota’s easy loop with wider, albeit harder-to-navigate, lanes. Thralls of market-goers paid no heed to the stop lights in the center as they herded themselves down each aisle and back.  

“There are more people than I’ve ever seen,” Dautch said. Despite his uncertainty about the move, he was all smiles as he interacted with plentiful customers browsing his display of lavender, fruits, and other colorful produce.  

“It still isn’t perfect, and the setup was complicated, but, all in all, the people are happy, so it couldn’t be better.”

And happy they were. Buskers flavored the air with fiddles and guitars — and, of course, a well-known didgeridoo — while families gushed about the new location with familiar vendors marketing their variety of homegrown produce. 

Many seemed to think it was as smooth a transition as it could have been, preserving the market’s vibrancy and connecting local farmers with “the heart of Santa Barbara,” as the market’s general manager, Sam Edelman, had hoped.