What Is A CSA?
CSA is an acronym for COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE. Committed members purchase "SHARES" in the farm CSA. By purchasing the share prior to harvest the member helps the small local farmer to cover operational costs of organic seed, organic fertilizer, fuel, equipment, labor, greenhouse supplies, etc. The member also shares in the risk that the farmer takes every time he plants crops. In return the member receives an abundant supply (depending on the weather) of locally grown certified organic fruit and vegetables.
History Of CSA's
This is a selection taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture
Community-supported agriculture began in the early 1960s in Germany, Switzerland, and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land. Groups of consumers and farmers in Europe formed cooperative partnerships to fund farming and pay the full costs of ecologically sound and socially equitable agriculture. In Europe many of the CSA style farms were inspired by the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner and experiments with community agriculture took place on farms using biodynamic agriculture. In 1965, mothers in Japan concerned about the rise of imported food and the loss of arable land started the first CSA projects, called teikei (提携) in Japanese - most likely unrelated to the developments in Europe.
The idea took root in the United States in 1984, when Jan VanderTuin brought the concept of CSA to North America from Europe. At the same time, German Biodynamic farmer Trauger Groh, founded with colleagues the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire. Vander Tuin had co-founded a community-supported agricultural project named Topinambur, located near Zurich, Switzerland. Coinage of the term "community-supported agriculture" stems from Vander Tuin and the Great Barrington CSA that he co-founded with Robyn Van En, its proprietor. (not true: the term was coined by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden in their 1988 publication Farms of Tomorrow: Community Supported Farms, Farm-Supported Communities, published by Biodynamic Literature, the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association Since that time, community supported farms have been organized throughout North America, mainly in the Northeast, the Pacific coast, the Upper-Midwest, and Canada. North America now has at least 13,000 CSA farms, 12,549 of them in the US alone (as of 2007), according to the US Department of Agriculture. One of the largest CSAs in the US is Angelic Organics.
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