[Published in Whatcom Watch (Whatcom county, Washington's environmental monthly), and also in the newsletter of John Jeavons/Ecology Action]

Beyond Community Supported Agriculture

Introduction

All over the country, folks are trying to reestablish a strong connection between the dinner table and the fields that yield the bounty to place there. The growth rate of the organic food sector of the economy is one sign of a growing desire for quality, as opposed to merely quantity. Another sign is the phenomenon of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), or subscription farming.

In the CSA-farming model, a group of consumers comes together and agrees to provide financial support, up front, for a particular farm in exchange for "shares" in the produce. Paricipating farms are organic, and are frequently even Biodynamic, in fact. Most offer a variety of vegetables and fruits, while some also include such products as nuts, dairy foods, and meat. The food is delivered to pick-up locations where members come to resupply on a weekly basis. This model is working in large cities like New York and Seattle as well as it is in smaller towns like Bellingham, WA.

Though CSA farms only started coming into existence in the U.S. in the mid-1980s, there are now estimated to be more than 1000 such farms around the country. Serving western Whatcom county, WA, alone there are four or five, says Mike Finger of Cedarville Farm, the original Bellingham CSA. Cedarville Farm is in its seventh season operating a CSA component, which makes up about 60% of its business (the rest going to the co-op and the farmer's market); it is serving about 100 local families.

CSAs offer a number of excellent opportunities, including the following: by establishing community foundations and creating populations bound to the well-being of particular farms, CSAs can help small farms reduce risks and remain economically viable ; by ensuring the viability of small farms, they can help to limit the need for deleterious inputs such as insecticides and herbicides; they can help to maintain economic strength and independence for the localities in which they operate, reducing dependence on outside entities and forces beyond farm and community control; they allow consumer preferences to be more easily and directly made known; and they can shorten the distances between production and consumption, positively impacting the quality of food, and helping to minimize externalized costs.

Of course, the CSA model is not a panacea. One reason, as things stand now, is that CSAs tend to offer only partial diets. For example, few, if any, CSA farms focus on grain growing significantly. Yet, according to literature from the Land Institute in Kansas, which does research on grains, 76% of all human food comes directly or indirectly from grains. In addition, the carbon which grain plants yield, and which must be reincorporated into the soil, is one of the most important elements for maintaining soil fertility.

For these and other reasons, John Jeavons, for example, of Ecology Action in Willits, California, author of How To Grow More Vegetables, considers that the CSAs of the future might start (at least) to offer complete diets. The various forms that CSA models take on are likely to go through changes as the concept's applications and territory expand. In addition, there are a variety of other methods that folks are beginning to experiment with, right here in our very own backyard, in hopes of bringing people closer to the sources of their food, and bringing people together to celebrate the possibilities of safe, locally-produced, and high-quality sustenance. But first, a little more background.