The Alachua County Farmers’ Market may relocate as early as 2026 to make room for a new county fire training facility.
The Alachua County Farmers’ Market, which is also known as the “441 Market,” was founded in 1972. It has rented its current facility, located at 5920 NW 13th St., from Alachua County since 1991.
Members of the Alachua County Farmers’ Market learned the market would not be able to extend its lease at the county-owned pavilion during its annual meeting in March.
According to Amanda Payton, the manager of the Alachua County Farmers’ Market, she and the members of the market were informed of the change by Anna Prizzia, the county commissioner for Alachua County District 3.
“At the time, [Prizzia] had informed us that the county is going to be working on building a new location,” Payton said. “They still don’t know where. They still don’t know when. But it’s going to be a multi-use facility.”
Prizzia said Alachua County is in the business planning stage of a food hub: an aggregation and distribution center with support services for small and mid-sized farmers. The food hub is not a project specific to the Alachua County Farmers’ Market, but the county could explore how to integrate farmers markets into the hub.
She said the county will be in planning for the construction of the new fire training facility for the next year but does not know exactly when construction will begin.
“We’ll be hiring an architect and engineering firm that’ll be actually doing the planning components and figuring out where everything will go on the property,” Prizzia said. “In the meantime, the market could continue to operate in that location. It’s after that that we don’t have a certain timeline in terms of when the next steps would happen for construction and when, precisely, we would be asking the market to vacate.”
Payton said she and the Alachua County Farmers’ Market board have started looking for other options to move the farmers market for a smooth transition.
“If we find somewhere that’s viable for us, we would like to go ahead and do the transition around January at the first of the year because peak season for farmers is in that March, April area, and we don’t want to be doing a transition right in the middle of peak, busy season,” Payton said.
Although the Alachua County Farmers’ Market board and the county are both looking for new options, some vendors feel the switch to a new location could significantly hurt their businesses.
Sita Dial, who owns and runs Sita’s Superfoods, has been a vendor at various farmers markets since the ‘90s. She started selling her sprouts and microgreens at the Alachua County Farmers’ Market in 2015.
“You can find me in this spot every week. And people, that’s how you grow your business,” she said. “That’s how you get customers like that come back every week. And we’re losing that.”
She also said the pavilion the market currently resides under allows her to sell her products even when it’s raining. She said she has lost product due to the rain at other farmers markets without pavilions or rain protection.
“I’m just a little person that’s making a living on a particular place that I might be losing,” Dial said. “And we’ve never had any kind of ability to go ask Alachua County to keep that place for us. There was no question on that. It was just like they said: this is the way it is, and that’s the way it is. And that’s sort of sad after 50 years.”
Prizzia said the county will be conducting a needs assessment in the fall to gather information about the needs of Alachua County farmers. The county is working with experts from the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), as well as other county consultants, to develop the needs assessment.
“We definitely are committed and invested in seeing our farmers succeed,” Prizzia said. “We just need to figure out a new strategy for how we support our local farmers having market access.”
The planning of a new fire training facility is in line with Alachua County’s recent fire station projects. Fire Station No. 80, located in Gainesville, opened in 2024. Fire Station No. 21, located on Northwest 173rd Street, had its grand opening in May.