Community-supported agriculture

Based on Wikipedia: Community-supported agriculture

In the mid-1960s, a group of Japanese mothers made a radical decision. Worried about pesticides, the industrialization of farming, and the decline of rural communities, they began making direct arrangements with local farmers. They called it teikei, which roughly translates to "partnership" or "cooperation." The idea was elegantly simple: consumers would pay farmers upfront for a season's worth of vegetables, sharing both the bounty of good harvests and the disappointment of bad ones.

These mothers had no idea they were pioneering a model that would spread across the globe.

The Basic Bargain

Community-supported agriculture, or CSA, flips the conventional relationship between farmers and consumers. In traditional farming, a farmer plants crops, tends them for months, harvests whatever survives weather and pests and disease, then hopes to sell it all at a price that covers the costs. The farmer bears all the risk. A late frost, a drought, a plague of locusts—these are the farmer's problems alone.

A CSA changes this equation. Consumers pay before the season begins, essentially buying a share of whatever the farm produces. If it's a banner year with tomatoes bursting from every vine, everyone celebrates together. If hail destroys the lettuce crop, everyone shares the loss together.

What do shareholders actually receive? Typically, a box arrives weekly or every two weeks, filled with whatever's ready for harvest. In spring, that might mean asparagus and salad greens. Summer brings the abundance: corn, peppers, squash, berries. Fall offers root vegetables and hardy greens. Some farms expand beyond produce to include eggs from pastured chickens, milk from grass-fed cows, bread from freshly ground flour, even meat from animals raised on the same land.

The contents of the box aren't chosen by the consumer. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the model. You eat what the land provides, when the land provides it. This requires a shift in thinking for people accustomed to supermarkets where strawberries appear in January and lettuce never runs out.

Two Farms, One Year, One Movement

The term "community-supported agriculture" was coined in the United States in 1986, when two farms on the East Coast—working independently, unaware of each other—launched what they believed was a new experiment in farming.

The CSA Garden at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was founded by Jan Vander Tuin, Susan Witt, and Robyn Van En. Vander Tuin was Swiss, and he brought with him experience from a community farm near Zurich called Topinambur (named after the Jerusalem artichoke, that knobby tuber that spreads enthusiastically through any garden where it's planted).

The same year, about a hundred miles north in New Hampshire, the Temple-Wilton Community Farm began under the guidance of Anthony Graham, Trauger Groh, and Lincoln Geiger. Groh was German, and like Vander Tuin, he carried European ideas about farming across the Atlantic.

Both men had been influenced by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher who in the 1920s developed something called biodynamic agriculture. Steiner's ideas were unconventional, to say the least—they involved planting according to lunar cycles and burying cow horns filled with manure to harness cosmic forces. But embedded within the esoteric practices was a practical insight: farming works better when it's connected to a specific community of people who care about the land.

The Great Barrington CSA eventually fragmented, with many members leaving in 1990 to form a new group called the Mahaiwe Harvest CSA. But one of its founders, Robyn Van En, became a tireless evangelist for the model. In 1992, she founded CSA North America to help spread the idea. She traveled constantly, teaching and inspiring, until her death in 1997.

The Temple-Wilton farm proved more durable. It still operates today, an important institution in its community, supported by local, state, and federal funding.

Why People Do This

The economic logic of a CSA seems, at first glance, to favor only the farmer. The farmer gets money upfront, reducing the need for loans. The farmer has a guaranteed market, eliminating the uncertainty of selling at farmers' markets or negotiating with grocery stores. The farmer shares risk with consumers rather than bearing it alone.

So why would consumers accept this deal?

The reasons vary. Some people want fresher food than supermarkets provide. A tomato picked ripe from the vine and delivered the next day tastes nothing like one picked green in Florida and shipped two thousand miles in a refrigerated truck. Some want to know exactly where their food comes from, who grew it, and how. Some want to support local economies rather than sending their grocery dollars to distant corporations. Some want to reduce the environmental impact of their food, since local farms eliminate long-distance transportation and often use fewer pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

And some simply find meaning in the connection itself.

Good CSA farmers cultivate relationships with their members. They send weekly newsletters describing life on the farm—the first asparagus shoots emerging, the battle against cucumber beetles, the satisfaction of a successful garlic harvest. They invite members to visit, to see the fields, to help with planting or harvesting. They transform the anonymous act of buying food into something personal.

This is what distinguishes a CSA from merely subscribing to a vegetable delivery service. The box of produce is almost secondary to the relationship it represents.

The Economics of Solidarity

Economists have a concept called "economic rent," which describes payments made beyond what's strictly necessary for a transaction. When someone pays a premium for organic tomatoes even though conventional tomatoes cost less and taste similar, they're paying rent—for environmental benefits, for supporting certain farming practices, for the feeling of making an ethical choice.

CSAs are built on economic rent. Members pay not just for vegetables, but for transparency, for environmental stewardship, for the relationship with a farmer they've met and whose fields they might have visited. They're willing to pay more than they would at a supermarket because they value things the supermarket can't provide.

This creates a philosophical tension. The original vision of CSAs—articulated by those early farms influenced by Steiner—was for producers and consumers to meet as equals, with fair prices and fair wages. But research suggests that many CSA farmers don't actually earn fair wages for their labor. They're sustained by passion for the work, by a desire to farm in a particular way, by values that transcend income maximization.

The consumers, meanwhile, often come from demographics that can afford to pay premium prices for premium values. CSAs have struggled to reach lower-income communities, though creative programs have tried to bridge this gap. Some CSAs offer sliding-scale pricing. Some partner with social service organizations. In New York City, the Coalition Against Hunger developed a CSA program specifically to serve underserved communities.

The Growth of a Movement

From those two farms in 1986, the movement has grown dramatically. By 2007, the United States Department of Agriculture counted over 12,500 CSA farms in America. The actual number is certainly higher, since many small operations fly under the radar of official surveys.

CSAs have concentrated in predictable places: New England, where the movement began; the Pacific Northwest, with its progressive food culture; California, where agriculture meets environmentalism; the Upper Midwest, with its history of cooperative enterprise. But they've also appeared in unexpected places, including urban areas where farms operate on vacant lots and rooftops.

One of the largest operations was Capay Organic (originally Capay Inc.) in California's Capay Valley. At its peak around 2010, it delivered boxes to 13,000 customers weekly while also selling at fifteen farmers' markets, running a retail store, and supplying restaurants with specialty orders. This scale represents something far removed from the intimate community farms of the original vision—more of an organic produce distribution company than a true CSA—but it shows how the basic model can be adapted and expanded.

Around the World

The CSA concept has spread globally, though it takes different forms and different names in different places.

In German-speaking countries—Germany, Austria, and the German regions of Switzerland—it's called Solidarische Landwirtschaft, which translates to "solidarity agriculture" and gets abbreviated to "Solawi." German farmers and consumers created a national network, the Bundesnetzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, in 2011 to connect and support these farms.

In the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, similar farms organize under the Fédération Romande d'Agriculture Contractuelle de Proximité, or FRACP, which was founded in 2008. FRACP is sponsored by Uniterre, a small farmers' union affiliated with La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement that champions the concept of food sovereignty—the idea that communities should control their own food systems rather than being subject to global markets and distant corporations.

Urgenci, based in France, networks together community-supported agriculture initiatives across Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and West Africa. The name is a French acronym for Urgence pour un Réseau Civique et Socio-Solidaire, roughly translating to "Urgency for a Civic and Socially-Solidary Network."

In the United Kingdom, the first CSA was established in Findhorn, Scotland, in 1994. The movement grew slowly until 2007, when the Big Lottery funded a program called Making Local Food Work, administered by the Soil Association. This provided resources for communities to establish CSAs across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A national umbrella organization, the Community Supported Agriculture Network, formed in 2013.

China's CSA movement emerged from crisis. A series of food safety scandals in the late 2000s—contaminated milk powder, pesticide-laden vegetables, fake eggs made from chemicals—shattered public trust in the industrial food system. Urban Chinese consumers began seeking direct relationships with farmers they could trust. By 2017, China had over 500 CSA farms, and the movement had become a significant force in developing organic and ecological agriculture in a country not known for either. Chinese CSA practitioners gather annually at a national symposium that began in 2009.

The Structure of Sharing

CSAs organize themselves in various ways, and these structural differences matter.

In a farmer-managed CSA, the farmer is the entrepreneur. They set up the operation, recruit subscribers, make all the management decisions, and bear most of the organizational burden. This is the simplest model and the most common, but it can be exhausting for farmers already working dawn to dusk in their fields.

In a shareholder or subscriber CSA, local residents take the initiative. They identify the need for a CSA in their community, find and hire a farmer to grow crops, and manage most of the organizational work themselves. The farmer focuses on farming; the community handles administration, marketing, and distribution. This reduces the burden on the farmer but requires an unusual level of consumer engagement.

A farmer cooperative brings together multiple farmers to offer a combined CSA. This allows for more diversity in a single box—one farm might specialize in greens, another in root vegetables, another in fruit—and spreads risk across multiple operations. If one farm has a bad year, others can compensate.

The farmer-shareholder cooperative combines the previous models: farmers and community members work together as true partners in planning, managing, and running the operation. This represents the closest approximation to the original vision of producers and consumers meeting as equals.

Research has found that CSAs with active core groups of engaged members—people who help with marketing, distribution, administration, and community organizing—are more profitable and more successful than those without. Yet by 1999, nearly three-quarters of American CSAs lacked such core groups. Most had evolved into subscription services rather than true community enterprises.

Women and the Land

One striking feature of community-supported agriculture: women play a much larger role than in conventional farming. Roughly forty percent of CSA farm operators are women, compared to far lower percentages in industrial agriculture.

This isn't coincidental. Much of the growth in women's participation in agriculture has occurred outside what researchers call the "male-dominated field of conventional agriculture." Alternative agriculture—organic, biodynamic, community-supported—has provided space for women to farm in ways that large-scale commodity agriculture has not.

The reasons are complex. CSAs often operate at smaller scales where brute physical strength matters less than relationship-building and organizational skill. They emphasize values—community connection, environmental stewardship, food quality—that women may prioritize differently than the income maximization that drives conventional agriculture. And they may simply offer more welcoming cultures than the heavily masculine world of industrial farming.

Beyond the Market

Some scholars see community-supported agriculture as something more profound than just an alternative marketing channel for vegetables. They see it as a form of "commoning"—a way of organizing economic life outside both markets and government.

This requires some explanation. In contemporary economies, most goods and services are distributed through markets (you pay money, you get stuff) or through government (the state collects taxes and provides services). But throughout human history, communities have also organized production and distribution through collective arrangements that aren't quite markets and aren't quite government. The medieval commons—shared pastures, forests, and fisheries managed by village communities—are the classic example.

CSAs represent a modern form of commoning. Members aren't just customers buying a product; they're participants in a collective enterprise to produce food for their community. The relationship isn't purely market-based (prices don't fluctuate with supply and demand) but it's not government provision either. It's something else: community self-organization.

In some countries, public policy has begun to recognize and support these arrangements through what researchers call "public-commons partnerships"—frameworks where government cooperates with community enterprises rather than either displacing them or leaving them entirely alone.

The Philosophical Roots

The American CSA movement explicitly drew on Rudolf Steiner's philosophical framework, which went far beyond farming techniques to encompass ideas about property, cooperation, and economy.

On property: Steiner believed land shouldn't be owned by individuals for profit but held in common by communities through legal trusts, then leased to farmers who would work it. The land belongs to the community; farmers are stewards, not owners.

On cooperation: Steiner envisioned replacing the traditional employer-employee relationship with networks of human relationships where everyone involved in an enterprise—farmers, workers, consumers—participated as partners rather than as parties to a wage contract.

On economy: Steiner argued that economic activity shouldn't aim at maximizing profit but at meeting the actual needs of the people and land involved. Prices should reflect real costs and genuine needs, not whatever the market will bear.

These ideas sound utopian, and in their pure form they've rarely been achieved. But they established an idealistic framework that continues to influence CSA practitioners who seek more than just an efficient distribution channel for their carrots and kale.

What Gets Lost, What Gets Found

The CSA model has obvious limitations. It doesn't work for all foods—you can't run a wheat CSA or a coffee CSA in most of America. It requires consumers to accept whatever the farm provides rather than choosing what they want. It demands flexibility in cooking: when you receive five pounds of zucchini in August, you need to know what to do with it. It works best for people with stable incomes who can pay upfront, time to cook from scratch, and tolerance for the occasional muddy beet.

The model also faces structural challenges. Many CSAs struggle financially. Farmers work crushing hours for modest compensation. Member retention is a constant challenge—people sign up enthusiastically, then drift away when the novelty fades or the onslaught of unfamiliar vegetables becomes overwhelming. The community aspect often remains more aspiration than reality, with members viewing their subscription as a produce delivery service rather than participation in a shared enterprise.

And yet something valuable happens when people connect their eating to a specific piece of land and the specific people who tend it. Industrial food systems are miracles of efficiency, delivering cheap abundance to billions of people. But they also create distance—between eaters and growers, between consumers and consequences, between appetites and seasons. A January strawberry from California is a kind of magic trick, but it's also a kind of forgetting.

CSAs remember. They remember that food comes from somewhere, that farming is difficult and uncertain, that eating connects us to land and weather and community in ways that matter even when we've structured our lives to ignore them.

Those Japanese mothers in the 1960s understood something important. They called it teikei—partnership, cooperation—and they were right about the word. What they created wasn't just a transaction but a relationship, and relationships, at their best, make everyone involved a little more human.