----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 9:14
AM
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] interesting
read on CSAs
Cool name for your farm, John. Is that from the
Monkey Wrench Gang? I posted the CSA article to another group and got lots
of emails from consumer members crabbing about the same consumer complaints in
the text. Reminds me again that about half the work of a CSA is
education of the customer.
Shawnee, zone 5 and weary of explaining
about what's in the box and why it costs what it costs and wishing I could
say, "just eat your greens dammit, and let some passionate, committed
grower make 75 cents an hour."
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:00:06 -0500 From: john AT seldomseenfarm.com To:
market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org Subject: Re: [Market-farming] interesting
read on CSAs
I think that article raises a number of valid issues with
the CSA model. If you're dealing with a subscription/drop site model, it
is likely more expensive to run than a similarly sized farmers market.
But there are many benefits to cash flow and planning, and then the
intangibles.
In our area there is a business running home
delivery of organic foods and products. They have ~1000 members or more,
and that is necessary to make home delivery possible. They buy some from
produce growers, but use industrial organic as a primary source. The
boxes are customizable, and you can add any number of different products to
the delivery. The business has grown very quickly, but they are not
limited by the scale of production like a farm would be. Veggies alone
would not be enough to justify home delivery over a wide area. You would
need to get your $/delivery up to the 35-50$ range to be worth while.
According to the study, 36 percent of members cited
supermarket withdrawal as their reason for leaving their CSA
program, characterized as “the wrong vegetables in the wrong quantities
at the wrong time.” In other words, consumers wanted more control
over the food they purchase. Perhaps this wouldn’t big such a big
deal if it weren’t for the fact that these people self-selected into
CSA programs in the first place. Apparently, those reasons couldn’t
overcome the inconveniences of the CSA format.
Has anyone
played around with customized CSA boxes, especially with a web based front end
(farmigo.com)? Something that would allow members to customize their
boxes and automate some of the administrative functions. There are a
couple web suites out there that will do that, but they're asking =>2% of
gross sales, and that is more than I'm willing to pay. A friend of mine
with PHP and MySQL experience is trying to rough in a web based store that
will do this. Our plan was to cherry pick code out of OsCommerce and
modify it to work within ordering CSA framework. I would love it if
there was an open source solution.
John
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