Community Supported Agriculture is a Win-Win for Everyone
By Amanda Cather
On a beautiful late spring afternoon in the Ag Reserve, cars turn into our farm and pull up to the little red house that serves as the distribution site for our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares. Kids pile out and run to visit the pigs or the tractors while adults prepare bags and coolers to carry their shares home. Inside, the little red house smells like freshly picked mint and scallions. Shareholders peruse the colorful crates of vegetables displayed along the walls, the freezer full of sustainably raised meat, and the refrigerator stocked with eggs. They laugh, chat and share recipes, thinking about the week ahead and the meals that they’ll make. Some have brought picnics, and some simply enjoy the chance to sit in the sunshine, away from the sounds of the city, and talk to their farmers. This is what it’s like on any given Thursday at our CSA pickup at Plow and Stars Farm in Montgomery County’s Agricultural Reserve.
How CSAs took root
The CSA model in the United States was created in the mid 1980s, based on a Japanese model known as teikei, by the staff and customers of two small farms in New England. They envisioned CSA as a partnership in which shareholders paid farmers up front at the beginning of the season for a portion of the season’s harvest. They intended the relationship between producer and buyer to be long-term and in-depth, with the key element of shared economic risk taking it beyond simply transactional to something deeper and more powerful. Its core principles included the elimination of any middleman between farms and customers; ongoing two-way communication about growing practices and customer preferences; and the creation of a balance between a living wage for farmers and farmworkers and affordable and accessible food for members.
Today, there are over 5,000 CSA farms in the United States. Somewhere around 20 of these are located in Montgomery County, including our own, Plow and Stars Farm, founded in 2014. My own relationship with the CSA model goes back more than 20 years, when I became a shareholder at Vanguarden CSA in Dover, Massachusetts. I loved the food, but I yearned for more—I didn’t want to just support the farmer, I wanted to BE the farmer. Working at Waltham Fields Community Farm outside of Boston for a decade gave me experience growing food for a 500-family CSA with a committed membership; our children literally grew up together, nourished by the soil of that little farm. When my husband Mark and I had the opportunity to start our own farm with our children, Jonah and Sadie, the CSA model was a natural fit for us.
The heart of the CSA partnership
Springtime is a busy and stressful time in the lives of most farmers. Poring over weather predictions to find a window to get work done, spending what feels like frightening amounts of money on seeds, supplies, and tools, and switching back and forth between task-based focus and big-picture vision all make farmers a little crazy in the spring. Having the support of our CSA shareholders takes away some of the stress because it means that every seed we plant already has a home. Our shareholders are our partners, the real reason we are able to do what we do without going into debt, the folks for whom we create value and who help guide our business choices. They are also our friends and neighbors, our sounding boards for new business ideas, our go-to sources for innovative recipes, and our guides.
Community supported agriculture is not just about what the farmer wants to grow, what the customer wants to buy, or what makes the most money. It is an ongoing conversation about what grows well on a certain piece of land, and how the economics of a small farm can be transformed by the investment of even a small number of families who love and support it. CSA shareholders have the unique ability to fundamentally impact the way their farm produces their food. Our shareholders constantly connect us with ways to grow more sustainably and ethically, whether it’s raising animals more humanely or learning new ways of building our soil. By the choices they make each week, they help us refine an efficient crop mix that is well suited to their tastes and our land. While many small businesses create opportunities for customers to provide feedback, CSA makes that relationship the foundation upon which the business is built.
Signing up for a CSA share is essentially jumping into a season-long dialogue between shareholder and farmer, farmer and soil, farm and family. Your household becomes an essential part of our local and national conversation about sustainability and resilience, whether small farms can survive in an era of processed foods and meal kits, how climate change will inevitably affect our ability to grow food and how we can both adapt in a hurry and make powerful changes to our food system for the long term.
CSA is also a unique form of self-care. Supporting a CSA for the season equals a commitment to your family to bring real, unprocessed food, into your home on a regular basis. It means that you become part of a community of people who will help you learn how to use that food, how to cook with what you have, making delicious, simple, nourishing meals from ingredients that were grown within a few miles of your home, on soil that is cared for and tended by people you know. All share in common the desire to create healthy meals for themselves and their families while creating the kind of support for a small farm that goes beyond the weekly purchase of a tomato at the farmers’ market. As writer Michael Pollan puts it, “cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. People who cook have healthier diets.”
Some potential CSA customers are concerned that the commitment associated with the CSA model limits its convenience. Indeed, in some ways CSA is stubbornly the opposite of the current economy’s on-demand model. Immediacy is replaced by rhythm and story—the rhythms of the weekly pickup and the seasonal ebb and flow of different crops, the ongoing story of the small farm and its meaning within the broader context of the local food system. Fortunately, some of the perceived inconvenience of CSA can be offset by the multitude of well-run CSA farms in the Agricultural Reserve. With the Reserve’s proximity to such a dense and diverse population, it is the ideal place for CSA to thrive, and for this powerful model to grow far beyond the 0.4 percent of American eaters it currently serves.
It’s a raw, cold Thursday afternoon in late fall. The little red house is packed to the gills with the abundance of the season: pastured pork, chicken and lamb fill the freezers while vegetables from spicy arugula to robust broccoli and cauliflower, delicate squash, and the season’s last sweet peppers overflow the crates along the walls. Shareholders make plans to pick up their Thanksgiving turkeys and swap ideas for holiday side dishes. Their visits might be shorter at this time of year, but the mutual sense of gratitude and community is just as powerful. Farmers and shareholders are so fortunate to be part of a group of people who draw hope and strength from the soil, which contains such mysteries and such power to heal itself and those it serves.
Amanda Cather owns and operates Plow and Stars Farm in Poolesville, Maryland with her husband Mark and their children. She grew up in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and farmed in Massachusetts and Colorado before being lucky enough to return to the Agricultural Reserve to start Plow and Stars.