Buying Local?

I went to our Farmer's Market yesterday evening. I didn't expect to find much and I wasn't disappointed! The main event in our town is Saturday mornings, Wednesdays aren't worth making a special trip. But since I was already there, I checked it out. There were a few stands with the expected zucchini, green beans, and flowers. But what surprised me was the stand with fully ripened tomatoes. I asked where they were from and they gave an address about 5 miles from my house. Hmm. I'm just flabbergasted that their tomatoes got ripe so fast.
 Then I went to the grocery store to get the produce that isn't ready locally. I was especially wanting a watermelon. I live smack dab in watermelon country but I knew I would have to buy one from down south since the plants around here are still small. The ones I put in my garden didn't survive the floods. Anyway I got a really nice ripe melon and this was on it:

Sorry for the bad quality of the picture but I thought it was pretty interesting that you can go to a website and see where your watermelon was grown. So I did. And there was lots of neat stuff to see there as well as the name of the farm where the melon came from. But now I'm left to wonder why they didn't just put the info on the melon instead of making me go look it up???? 

The info I got looked like this:

Melon Number:

106001127908 

Watermelon

  Seedless - 7197

Country of Origin  

  United States Of America

State:  

  AZ  Maricopa County

Grower  

  Rousseau Farming Company

Believe me I am all for knowing as much about my food as possible, I'm just not sure why they went about it this way. So now I now my melon came from Arizona. And this is what my birds think of Arizona watermelons:

mmmmmm

They picked it clean-I can't wait til they get to try local!