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community supported agriculture

What is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)?

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms provide a weekly delivery of sustainably grown produce to consumers during the growing season (approximately June to October). Those consumers, in turn, pay a subscription fee. But CSA consumers don’t so much “buy” food from particular farms as become “members” of those farms. CSA operations provide more than just food; they offer ways for eaters to become involved in the ecological and human community that supports the farm.

What does CSA membership involve?

Membership arrangements vary among farms. For instance, some CSA operations deliver their food to the neighborhoods where members live, while others arrange for members to come to the farm and help make deliveries. Some CSA farms expect members to work on the farm at least once during the season while others only expect members to support the farm with their membership.

Another month and yet another food recall. Over the past few years high profile food recalls have seemingly become the norm. These national or regional recalls, whether it's beef, toys from china, spinach, tomatoes, or peanut butter, is a failure of our food and trade agencies. They have failed to do their job and these failures are catching up with us. The 'us' doesn't only include the consuming public, it also means the produce growers in this particular case because the Food and Drug Administration has not yet identified the source of the contamination. It has been several weeks since the start of the outbreak and with no source identified, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tomatoes have gone to rot because they can't be sold or unharvested or destroyed by tomato growers. Lost revenues often means lost jobs.