Community Supported Agriculture The best way to support local farmers is to become partners with them. If we pay in advance for a year of our food, we share the costs and risks of agriculture. In return we get fresher food, keep good farms alive, and finally know where our vegetables come from. And our new friend, the farmer, can plan just how much to grow without having to fret about how generous the World Market will be this year. This is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a social and economic arrangement that aims to close the gap in the distant relationship between consumer and producer. The CSA model arrived in the US in 1984 from Switzerland [see Jan VanderTuin’s account, page 6] spawning hundreds of small farms growing food for 10 to 100 families each. Some communities are even taking on the ownership of farmland themselves. With permanent land trusts and stable agreements with farmers, they foster community stability along with agricultural and ecological integrity. Because the health of the land and the community is a major issue for those who’ve become involved, and because reliance on distant resources destabilizes local economics, these farms do not use petrochemicals. And since they produce nearly all of a family’s vegetables, the farms tend towards agricultural diversity rather than ecologically destructive monocropping. CSA’s run counter to all modem agricultural thinking, the kind that emerged alongside the global marketplace. The current system hurts farmers and farm workers everywhere, puts great strain on the environment, wastes immense quantities of food, and makes many consumers profoundly suspicious about both their produce and the consequences of growing it. The first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project began outside of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a town teeming with interesting social projects (see pages 8 and 9). A few similar projects already existed quietly in the States, but the idea didn't spread until after the Great Barrington group was picked up by the media in the mid- 1980's, a time of massive US farm failure. In a model CSA, the group calculates the needs of the its members and aims at growing just this amount of food, eliminating the waste in the process of farming for an impersonal market. Waste is phenomenal even among the most careful farmers: poor markets in Oregon this fall left nearly half of all organic produce to rot. The members, also called share-holders, share all the This broccoli is already paidfor. Muslin Creek Farm in the hills surrounding Cottage Grove, Oregon is selling less on the unpredictable open market and more to consumers in neighboring communities who pay in advance for a season’s vegetables. Muslin Creekfarms without petrochemicals. risk as well as the benefits of a farming project. If raccoons or deer eat the com, or if squash are victims of a flash flood, it is understood that there will be neither com nor squash that week. On the other hand, if the cabbage begins to bolt in alternating hot and cold spells, the unplanned bounty will be split among all. If there’s too much food, the groups are large enough, 50-200 people, to be broadly aware of community needs, and they'll donate or sell the surfeit. Since tastes vary, shareholders often barter food among themselves from their twice-weekly allotments. The CSA aims to growjust enoughfoodfor its shareholders, eliminating wasteful overproduction for the impersonal market. This sharing of risk in the partnership between consumer and producer mitigates most of the headaches of modem farming: the need to scrape up capital, fear for an income and worry about bankmptcy. Rather than scrambling Page 4 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2
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