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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Farm-connected CSAs should offer more than just ‘veggie subscriptions’

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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, OWL-OldWaysLiving@yahoogroups.com
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Farm-connected CSAs should offer more than just ‘veggie subscriptions’
  • Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:54:38 -0600


Farm-connected CSAs should offer more than just ‘veggie subscriptions’

http://grist.org/locavore/csa-just-a-vegetable-subscription-or-a-way-to-truly-connect-with-your-farm/

I was recently struck by a promotion I saw on the site Local Harvest, which
lists organic and locally grown food around the country. The site reads,
“Many farms offer subscriptions for weekly baskets of produce, flowers and
other farm products. Try a CSA this year!”

“A subscription to local farm products?” I thought. “Is that all
community-supported agriculture has become?”

As the local food movement has gone from a trickle to a sweeping current, and
sales of local farm products have grown, it seems that many
community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscribers may have lost touch with
the original intention behind the term. As a farmer, and one who’s researched
and written about the history of CSAs in the U.S. and abroad, I find this
trend deeply troubling. It seems many urban residents now see the CSA as just
another form of “retail farming” rather than a model for civic agriculture, a
site-specific form of solidarity, or associative economics that can transform
relationships.

In 1986, when the farmers behind Indian Line Farm and Temple-Wilton Community
Farm started the first CSAs in this country, they were seeking solutions to
the farm crisis that was driving people off the land. The number of
family-scale farms was dropping every year. The work of food production — not
to mention all of the risk — fell on the farmers, while prices rarely covered
the costs of production, let alone provided a living wage. The CSA model
invited local consumers to share the harvest and the risks by paying in
advance for a whole season. They would feel a sense of ownership in the farm,
and they took whatever the farm could produce in return.

The farmers at Indian Line Farm literally divided up the harvest of each
week’s crop equally among the shareholders. Everyone participated —
harvesting, weeding, or helping with distribution, promotion, or
administration. Temple-Wilton separated the food from the price-per-pound
mentality by summoning all members to an annual meeting where they made bids
for payments to cover the farm budget. Once the season began, members took
the amount of food they needed regardless of how much they had paid.

The value of commitment

Today, while many models like this still exist, there are also some CSAs that
have abandoned entirely the notion of sharing the risk. In crowded markets
like the San Francisco Bay Area, farms like Full Belly Farm and Capay Organic
allow members to join for as little as one month. Farm Fresh to You, Capay
Organic’s produce box service, and one of the largest in the country,
advertises: “Customer Friendly, Flexible, Convenient — Cancel anytime — No
commitment.”

All members of Genesee Valley Organic CSA play some role in the workings of
the farm (these folks are washing vegetables).

The popularity of the CSA concept has also spawned imitators with no farm
base at all, who use the local farm connection to lure customers to their
convenient box delivery schemes. One local food service claims to run “very
much like a community-supported agriculture, or CSA program.” But the
entrepreneur-owner does not pay the farmers in advance or share the risk with
them in any way. As the Wisconsin-based FairShare CSA website puts it, “These
‘box schemes’ source products from all over the country or world, just as
most grocery stores do … You don’t build a relationship with any of the
farmers involved and it may be difficult to even find out where something
really came from.”

Dave Runsten of Community Alliance with Family Farmers in California tells me
that the Department of Food and Agriculture in that state is working on an
official definition of CSA. Runsten says the state plans to define
single-farm CSAs and multi-farm CSAs, and they’re considering banning the use
of the term by anyone buying from wholesalers or not requiring advance
payment. That’s a start, but what about sharing the risk?

The United States Department of Agriculture defines CSA this way: “CSA
consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation
so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s
farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the
risks and benefits of food production.”

Meanwhile, Angelic Organics, a biodynamic farm in the Chicago area that
supplies over 1,000 shares to members, describes the relationship in more
colorful language:

When you sign up, you dedicate yourself to being our customer for the
year, thus providing us a secure market — a welcome measure of certainty in
the fickle world of farming! We, in turn, dedicate ourselves to being your
farmers, providing you with a varied, nutritious vegetable diet. We do our
very best to bring you a beautiful and bountiful box each week, but since our
boss, Nature, provides no guarantees — we can’t offer any either. One of the
premises of a Community Supported Agriculture program is that the shareholder
shares, through the veggies, the farmers’ experience of nature’s mischief
(and blessings).

Beyond convenience

In the 25 years since the first CSAs appeared, thousands of farms have
adopted the model. Farms ranging in size from half an acre to hundreds of
acres have benefited from the support of steady season-long sharers. The CSA
model has also inspired and enabled an astonishing variety of farm-based
projects with social service missions like the Homeless Garden Project in
Santa Cruz, Calif., which employs homeless people, and Red Wiggler Community
Farm in Pennsylvania, which gives meaningful work to adults with
developmental disabilities.

Member involvement also varies tremendously. New York’s Genesee Valley
Organic CSA and Missouri’s Fair Share Farm stand out as rare farmer-customer
co-operatives — all members contribute, either by taking a core group job or
helping with farm work and distribution. Vermont Valley Community Farm in
Wisconsin recruits 50 of its 1,250 members to work as harvest crew,
exchanging labor for vegetables. Still other CSAs make farm work voluntary or
offer discounts to members who provide drop-off points.

Committed CSA members have also been known to make additional investments and
loans to farms in need. This is a phenomenon I know firsthand. When my own
farm, Peacework Organic Farm, needed financial support to secure land a few
years back, our CSA members pitched in so that a local land trust could buy
the farm and lease it back to us.

This isn’t the kind of community that we should take for granted.

And while some commercialization may be inevitable when a product of
counterculture enters the mainstream the way the CSA model has, the
conversations I hear about how “inconvenient” it is for consumers are missing
the point.

As I see it, reducing CSA to a mere food box subscription scheme would
castrate the CSA model, taking away its power to create lasting relationships
between the people who grow and eat food. As Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini
would say, CSAs allow citizens to become “co-producers” with their farmers,
rather than passive consumers.

At their best, authentic CSAs are a win-win-win. Farmers get living wages and
freedom from worry about profits and losses. Everyone weathers the tough
times and benefits from the good times. Nothing goes to waste, and community
investments help pay for land and equipment. Most of all, eaters get healthy
food, good company, and the deep — if not always “convenient” — satisfaction
that comes from playing an immediate role in transforming the food system.




  • [Livingontheland] Farm-connected CSAs should offer more than just ‘veggie subscriptions’, Tradingpost, 04/30/2012

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