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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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