Community Supported Agriculture’ll Have You Whistling Dixie

You want vegetables but you just don’t have the time. I mean you want the taste and quality of home grown but there is not another minute in the day for you to build a raised bed. The Lord knows you don’t have a tiller or the time to till up a patch even if you had one.  You could go to the grocery store, they have organic, but can you talk face to face with the farmer that grew the endive or tomatoes you are buying? No, you can talk to the produce manager but the chances are that the manager hasn’t even met the farmer. Well, how do you get your homegrown produce then?

There are a few choices out there. In most counties there is at least one local farmers market held sometime during the week during the spring and summer. Some cities have several markets on different days or in competition with one another. You can even go to some of the farms and buy from a farm stand right there at the source. Occasionally, the farmer at the farm stand will let you go into the field to pick what you want if it’s not at the stand. Which, leads to one more option. There is a plethora of you pick farms. You can get any number of things from greens and tomatoes to blueberries and strawberries at you pick farms.

One more way to get the homegrown vegetables you crave is called Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA for short. There are many ways to run a CSA, but the central aspect of the CSA is to pay upfront and you get the homegrown vegetables for a either a given amount of time or a given amount of money. Some CSA farms set a season, say 40 weeks, and package up a box of vegetables and deliver it to a specified location once a week. Others will take your payment and set up an account and you order the vegetables you want until the credit is used up. The farm stand model is also used you pay in advance and come pick up what you want at the farm on a given day. Then you get into hybrids of any two or three methods and we could go on all day discussing Community Supported Agriculture set ups.

The CSA allows you to get the vegetables you want and direct access to the grower. Farmers get a benefit from this arrangement as well. The time farmers need money most is at the beginning of the year, but there is not so much produce to sell for revenue. With the CSA a farmer gets a large amount of money upfront to use on seeds, labor, materials and other stuff needed to grow vegetables.  One extra thing that ties the farmer and consumer together in this situation and attenuates the stress of the farmer is the sharing of risk. Buying a share in a CSA comes with an understanding of the nature of agriculture. Specifically, crops are not guaranteed. If the weather is bad or an infestation or disease hits, the shareholder and farmer take the hit together.

A CSA often takes wholesale orders and takes produce to a farmers market. These activities increase the income and expand the presence of a CSA during the most productive time of the year. Once the share list is made out or the share orders are placed, a farmer will sell excess produce to restaurants, sell it at the farm stand, or take it to market before it goes bad.

If I ran a CSA it would be set up on the debit model. Shareholders would pay 400 up front and be able to pick from a list of available vegetables (grown according to season). Once (or twice a week if possible) orders would be delivered to a pick up location or to the shareholders house. If the shareholder’s account runs out they can invest more money in their share. For rush orders I’d charge a delivery fee (if it happened to not be a delivery day). I would start off with 10 or so shares so there would be a lot of personal contact. 

If you want more info or have any questions let me know at lknzfarm@gmail.com