Community Supported Agriculture
By Elizabeth Wood

In a globalized food system where even the supermarket food labeled organic may come from halfway around the globe, some people are rediscovering the value of eating local food. One way of connecting with local farms is the system I use at my farm called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

The CSA concept, which arrived in the U.S. from Europe and Japan in the 1980s, has caught on fast here. Already, there are more than 1,200 CSA farms in the U.S., according to Sharing the Harvest, a book about CSAs by Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En. There are dozens of CSAs in Vermont.

Community Supported Agriculture is a system of farming in which families and individuals become farm members by providing an annual financial contribution to cover the production costs of the farm. In return, they receive a weekly selection of produce from the farm. Members share the risks of lower crop yields due to factors such as bad weather and reap the rewards of bumper crops when all goes well.

Members of CSAs join for the growing season before the year's first crops are harvested. Then they come to a pick-up place—often at the farm—once a week to collect a share of the crops that are in season, picked that day. Some CSA farms allow members to pick extra flowers, berries, herbs, or vegetables on their own.

“My favorite thing about being a community farmer is that it allows me to concentrate on growing the best possible food and not worry about where the money is going to come from,” said Anthony Graham of the Temple-Wilton farm in New Hampshire, which was the first CSA in the nation when in opened in 1986. “I visit other farmers who grow for supermarkets and I can tell that when they look at their rows of vegetables, they're not seeing food, they are seeing money. In the past four or five years, interest in our farm has just exploded. We now have a waiting list of over 75 families. If it keeps going like this, soon we will have more people on the waiting list than we have members.”
People may choose to join a CSA for the same reasons they would shop at a local hardware store instead of at Home Depot. Buying locally keeps money in the community. Farms keep Vermont's landscape looking beautiful. And eating locally is better for the environment.

However, those who join for idealistic reasons soon discover another reward: high-quality fresh food. The difference in flavor between bitter old brussels sprouts that have been in refrigeration for weeks and fresh ones harvested just after the first frost is amazing. Likewise, supermarket carrots and tomatoes can't compare to those fresh out of the field.

CSAs reintroduce people to the idea of eating what's in season in their region. At my CSA farm in southeastern Vermont, we harvest from the last week of May through the first week of November. Though I use some season-extension techniques, I obviously can't have tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers all the time. Many CSA members say they enjoy breaking out of cooking routines. I provide recipes and cooking advice, especially for veggies that may be unfamiliar to members.

CSA members should observe, and ask about, the growing practices and labor conditions at their farm. Most CSA farmers grow all or most of their members' food. But some CSAs function more like buying clubs, purchasing much of the members' share from other farms. It's a good idea to ask questions to make sure you really know where the food is coming from. As a farmer, I appreciate it when people ask questions about how their food is produced. It lets me know that they care about issues that are also very important to me.

I've also found that people join and keep coming back to the CSA for the chance to visit the farm. There is a desire to connect with the earth through agriculture that nearly everyone shares. People want to see the farm and meet the farmer, not only to make sure that farm practices are in keeping with their values (organic, pasture-raised farm animals, etc.) but also to experience a little bit of the process of bringing food out of the earth. Parents want to show the farm to their children. Children are fascinated by seeing the chickens eat or the goats get milked or even a butterfly on a flowering plant.

Many CSAs offer social events for their members like on-farm potluck meals or voluntary work days. Most offer monthly newsletters with farm news and recipes for cooking the dozens of varieties of vegetables available. A few deliver food to their members' homes. Many offer discounts for low-income families.

For farmers, the benefits of CSA include getting to know the people who will eat the food they work so hard to grow, and being able to spend the warm months in their fields farming, not driving a delivery truck, or on the phone marketing and trying to collect overdue bills from stores and restaurants. Farmers also appreciate not having to store, package, and ship their crops. CSA farmers can pass all these savings on to their members.

CSA farmers have all their marketing done by the time the first harvest is ready. And CSAs let farmers earn $1 for every $1 of their food consumers buy. The average American farmer, by contrast, gets less than 20 cents for every $1 of their food sold to consumers.

Buying direct is also good for the planet because it reduces the amount of fossil fuels burned to transport food from the field to your dinner table. It's often said that the average American meal has traveled 1,300 miles by the time it's eaten. Studies show that vegetables lose nutritional value every hour after they are harvested.

As organic farming has become a multibillion dollar industry, large corporations that employ questionable practices have begun to produce the organic food found in many grocery stores. They often use tons of plastic sheeting to cover their fields and prevent weeds, and employ Mexican immigrants in conditions that labor unions call exploitative.
As the federal government has taken over the organic certification process, some small-scale farmers question whether the small number of inspectors can really guarantee that farms the consumer will never see aren't using banned farm chemicals or other nonorganic practices. Independent studies have found pesticide residue on supposedly organic food in U.S. supermarkets.

Seven decades ago all farms were “organic” because there were no man-made farm chemicals. With the end of World War II, military contractors went looking for a new market for their new poisonous chemicals. They found that market in Americans farmers. It wasn't until the 1970s, with the birth of the modern environmental movement, that the term “organic farming” became popular.

And Vermont may be the birthplace of the modern organic farming movement. If the then-Putney-based Northeast Organic Farming Association wasn't the first organization for organic farmers when it opened in 1971, it was close to it. Vermont farmers have been pioneers in the organic movement. Hopefully we can redirect that movement in a way that ensures a connection with local communities. Community Supported Agriculture is one way to make that connection.