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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] CSAs--a new ownership slant
  • Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:54:23 -0500

In addition to increasing organic and health consciousness, rising energy costs are heating the trend to locavorism. CSAs are cashing in. Here's the new psychology: customers are owners. What a concept!

Note the prices some of the farm "owners" are paying for fresh flowers. Who says small-acreage modern farming doesn't pay well?

And what CSA farmer couldn't use a little help with the weeding? Once you get customers trained so they pull weeds and not carrots, you can start dreaming of expansion, or, uh, vacations.



Cutting Out the Middlemen, Shoppers Buy Slices of Farms

CAMPTON TOWNSHIP, Ill. — In an environmentally conscious tweak on the typical way of getting food to the table, growing numbers of people are skipping out on grocery stores and even farmers markets and instead going right to the source by buying shares of farm.

On one of the farms, here about 35 miles west of Chicago, Steve Trisko was weeding beets the other day and cutting back a shade tree so baby tomatoes could get sunlight. Mr. Trisko is a retired computer consultant who owns shares in the four-acre Erehwon Farm.

“We decided that it’s in our interest to have a small farm succeed, and have them be able to have a sustainable farm producing good food,” Mr. Trisko said.

Part of a loose but growing network mostly mobilized on the Internet, Erehwon is participating in what is known as community-supported agriculture. About 150 people have bought shares in Erehwon — in essence, hiring personal farmers and turning the old notion of sharecropping on its head.

The concept was imported from Europe and Asia in the 1980s as an alternative marketing and financing arrangement to help combat the often prohibitive costs of small-scale farming. But until recently, it was slow to take root. There were fewer than 100 such farms in the early 1990s, but in the last several years the numbers have grown to close to 1,500, according to academic experts who have followed the trend.

“I think people are becoming more local-minded, and this fits right into that,” said Nichole D. Nazelrod, program coordinator at the Fulton Center for Sustainable Living at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., a national clearinghouse for community-supported farms. “People are seeing ways to come together and work together to make this successful.”

The shareholders of Erehwon Farm have open access to the land and a guaranteed percentage of the season’s harvest of fruit and vegetables for packages that range from about $300 to $900. Arrangements of fresh- cut blossoms twice a month can be included for an extra $120 — or for the deluxe package, $220 will “feed the soul” with weekly bouquets of lilies and sunflowers and other local blooms.

Shareholders are not required to work the fields, but they can if they want, and many do.

The rest of the article is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/us/10farms.html?em&ex=1215921600&en=655d2d9570e156bb&ei=5087%0A


  • [Homestead] CSAs--a new ownership slant, Gene GeRue, 07/11/2008

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