Jackson's Local Food Gap Has Always Been About Selling, Not Growing

Where does a Teton County carrot go between the last Saturday on Town Square and the first market of winter? On this year's calendars, no market in town is scheduled to take it. The Jackson Hole Farmers Market held its final 2026 Town Square market on September 26. Slow Food in the Tetons wrapped its Summer People's Market three days before that, on Wednesday, September 23. The next in-person local market on any calendar is the Winter People's Market on November 21. That leaves 56 days between the last summer Saturday and the first winter date.

Those eight weeks don't mean nothing is growing. They point to a different problem, and the clearest description of it comes from the farmers themselves.

What farmers said was missing

Shelby Belote, a local-food advocate who sits on the Jackson Hole Farmers Market board, has spent about a decade working with farmers and food makers who sell in Jackson. One of those projects was helping Haderlie Farms in Thayne build a greenhouse. According to the Jackson Hole News&Guide, farmers told her that the lack of ways to sell over the winter was the gap that made it hard to keep a farm business viable.

"All I did was listen to them," Belote said.

Production keeps going after September. The Farmers Market says Haderlie's climate-controlled greenhouse has been running since the winter of 2025–26 and supplies the winter markets, with greenhouse vegetables grown from November through April. So the produce exists in the coldest months. What has been scarce is a place in Jackson where a farmer can leave it and where a shopper can find it on an ordinary Tuesday.

Distance makes this harder. "For farmers to be able to access Jackson, some of them are driving eight hours round trip," Belote told the News&Guide. "For them to do that, they need to be able to drop for a substantial amount of time." An afternoon market a few times a month barely justifies an eight-hour round trip. A building with enough cold storage to take a real delivery does.

The house at Broadway and Bruun

That is why the building took so long to find. Belote searched for four or five years before settling on a house downtown, and the requirement that ruled out other spaces was size. It had to hold enough cold storage. The house is at 211 E. Broadway Ave., on the corner of Bruun Boulevard.

Longtime residents may recognize it as the Miller House. Teton County's historic-properties inventory lists it as the Robert & Grace Miller House at 211 East Broadway and dates it to 1914. A 2014 News&Guide history feature says Robert and Grace Miller moved into the house in 1921 from the homestead to the north where they had lived since the 1880s. It describes Robert as Jackson's first banker and Grace as mayor during the town's all-woman government. The Quinn Hill Foundation bought and preserved the house specifically to give local food a permanent home, and it serves as the project's lead sponsor and steward.

A homestead family's house on Broadway, now preserved and fitted with cold storage for ranch and farm deliveries from two states, follows a straight line from the valley's agricultural past.

How The Farm is built to work

The Farm is a nonprofit storefront meant to act as a hub for regional producers. According to the News&Guide, it will sell produce, meat, cheese, fermented foods, baked goods and other goods from six Wyoming counties and two Idaho counties. The organization says 50 or more farmers, ranchers and producers have signed on. It has not released a full list of vendors.

Several details of the model connect directly to the problem farmers described:

• Daily hours. The store plans to open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Under the winter market schedule, by comparison, a shopper gets one afternoon at a time.
• Producer share. Farmers receive 90% of the proceeds from every sale.
• Pricing. Prices will run slightly above a grocery store and will be partly subsidized by philanthropy.
• Classroom. The building will include a classroom for farmer-led workshops on how food is grown. Belote said farmers asked for that too.
• Funding runway. Belote has raised $1 million to cover equipment and three years of overhead, including grants from the Teton Conservation District and the Wyoming Department of Family Services.

Belote has been direct about the price premium. "The concept is that you want to support local food and local farmers, so you are okay paying a little bit more because you are supporting working lands," she told the paper.

The opening date is still not fixed. The Farm's website says "Opening October 2026" without naming a day. The News&Guide reported that construction was underway and that Belote expected to open within a month or two. The posted hours are planned hours, and the first weeks may change them.

What a storefront won't change

A store open every day does not mean every item is available every day. Belote has said so herself. "There will be months that you'll be showing up at The Farm and you cannot source a specific product," she told the News&Guide. "That is how food is truly grown."

That limit explains why the winter markets still matter. The Farm offers access every day, and the winter markets bring producers and shoppers together on set dates. Here is the in-person calendar as published so far:

The Jackson Hole Farmers Market schedules eight winter markets from December 2026 through March 2027, switching between Jackson and Teton Village, and says Haderlie's greenhouse produce keeps them supplied. Only the first two dates are shown above. The full rotation is on the market's site. Slow Food in the Tetons lists its five winter dates but has not yet posted a venue or hours.

Between those dates, Slow Food's website advertises a year-round online marketplace for local and regional food. Orders are placed weekly and picked up Thursday or Friday at its Farm Stand in the Snake River Brewing lot at 280 S. Jackson St. The page carries no date, so check the current pickup schedule before planning a week around it.

How October through March fits together

Taken together, the off-season looks different from the summer. From June through September, a shopper had a fixed Saturday on Town Square and a Wednesday People's Market. From October through March, local food reaches town through three channels running at different speeds. The Farm, once open, is planned as the daily one. Slow Food's online ordering runs weekly. The winter markets, thirteen dates in all between the two organizations, run periodically from November 21 into March.

The 56-day stretch after September 26 is where the change shows most. This year that stretch has no in-person market on either organization's calendar, and it is also the window The Farm has set for its opening. If the store opens in October as its site says, Jackson will have a daily place to buy local food during those weeks, in the house the Millers moved into from their homestead in 1921.

The farms that supply The Farm are the working lands the valley's conservation conversation tends to revolve around. At Tom Evans Real Estate, stewardship of land like that is central to how we advise on ranch and acreage properties. If you own agricultural ground in Teton County, or are considering it, and want to talk through what keeping it productive involves, we welcome you to Request a Confidential Consultation.