A CHOICE TO MAKE : YOUR OWN ORGANIC GARDEN
or CSA (COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE) SHARES?
There is no question that the ultimate source of fresh, organic food can only be your own food-producing Organic & Sustainable Garden, in your own backyard, instead of a useless lawn, or on your own rooftop, or maintained as part of a local Community Garden.
However, you may not have the time or inclination to do so, or possibly there is no land at all available locally (say, you live in Manhattan in NYC), or don't know where to get a "ready-made garden", or how to get someone do it for you. In such cases, your best choice is probably a share in a CSA project.
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a relatively new socio-economic model of food production, sales, and distribution aimed at both increasing the quality of food and the quality of care given to the land, plants and animals – while substantially reducing potential food losses and financial risks for the producers. A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farming or advanced gardening operation so that the land so used becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community's farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.
The modus operandi of a CSA is usually a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables, sometimes also flowers, fruits, herbs and even milk or meat products in some cases.
Originally founded by bio-dynamic farmers following the teachings of the founder of the Waldorf Schools, the CSA approach has become progressively more mainstream and is slowly gaing a wider acceptance, and a variety of similar production and economic sub-systems are in use worldwide:
Association pour le maintien de l’agriculture paysanne (AMAP) in France
Agriculture soutenue par la communauté (ASC) in Québec
Landwirtschaftsgemeinschaftshof in Germany
Reciproco in Portugal
Teikei (提携) in Japan.Teikei is a system of community-supported agriculture in Japan, where consumers purchase food directly from farmers. Teikei is closely associated with small-scale, local, organic farming, and volunteer-based, non-profit partnerships between producers and consumers. Millions of Japanese consumers participate in teikei. It is widely cited as the origin of community-supported agriculture around the world.
While there is some disagreement as to the "first" teikei group, the concept can be traced back to the mid-1960s, when a group of Japanese women banded together to purchase fresh milk, at a time when how milk and dairy consumption had not yet been identified as the source of numerous health-related problems (see http://www.notmilk.com/ about that).
A general movement towards consumer-farmer partnerships in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s was driven by environmental issues and a well-founded distrust of the quality of food in the conventional food system. One of the founding teikei groups, the Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA), founded in 1971, describes teikei as "an idea to create an alternative distribution system, not depending on the conventional market. Though the forms of teikei vary, it is basically a direct distribution system. To carry it out, the producer(s) and the consumer(s) have talks and contact to deepen their mutual understanding: Both of them provide labor and capital to support their own delivery system... Teikei is not only a practical idea but also a dynamic philosophy to make people think of a better way of life either as a producer or as a consumer through their interaction."
Teikei in Japanese means "cooperation", "joint business", or "link-up". In reference to CSA, it is commonly defined as "food with the farmer's face on it".
While there is no evidence that teikei was the direct inspiration for Community Supported Agriculture in the United States, their ultimate inspiration came from the same source: the concepts about a "bio-dynamic agriculture" originally developed by Rudolf Steiner in Austria and Switzerland from 1919 to 1925.
Nonetheless, there have been a few examples of Community Supported Agriculture programs that have followed the Japanese model closely. The system is valued for its ability to make small-scale agriculture more economically viable and give more control to consumers over the food they consume. Although the Community Supported Agriculture movement was born out of anthroposophical and biodynamic farming initiatives, CSA has also enjoyed the benefit of gaining popularity through the booming Organic Farming movement in the United States that experienced rapid and growth in the late '90s and early '00s, leading to the establishment of organic produce in mainstream retail sales.
Some data about Teikei can be found here:
http://www.joaa.net/english/teikei.htmThe CSA system as we know it 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, socially equitable agriculture. In Europe many of the CSA-style farms were inspired by the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner and the earliest 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 - possibly in a way unrelated to the developments in Europe. The idea took root in the United States in 1984, when the concept of CSA was brought to North America from Europe. 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 1,300 CSA farms, with estimates ranging as high as 3,000.
CSA generally is the practice of focusing on the production of high quality foods using organic or biodynamic farming or gardening methods. This kind of farming or production gardening operates with a much greater-than-usual degree of involvement of consumers and other stakeholders — resulting in a stronger than usual consumer-producer relationship. The core design includes developing a cohesive consumer group that is willing to fund a whole season’s budget in order to get quality foods, or even to maintain a year-round production facility, using suitable techniques and approaches.
The system has many variations on how the farm budget is supported by the consumers and how the producers then deliver the foods. By CSA theory, the more a farm embraces whole-farm, whole-budget support, the more it can focus on quality and reduce the risk of food waste or financial loss.
In its most formal and structured European and North American form, CSAs focus on having:
Thus, individuals, families or groups do not pay for x pounds or kilograms of produce, but rather support the budget of the whole operation and receive weekly what is seasonally ripe.
This approach eliminates the marketing risks and costs for the producer and an enormous amount of time, often manpower too, and allows producers to focus on quality care of soils, crops, animals, co-workers — and on serving the customers. There is little to no loss in this system, since the producers know in advance who they are growing for and how much to grow, etc.
Some families have enrolled in subscription CSAs in which a family pays a fixed price for each delivery, and can start or stop the service as they wish. This kind of arrangement is also referred to as crop-sharing or box schemes. In such cases, the farmer may supplement each box with produce brought in from neighboring farms for a better variety. Thus there is a distinction between the farmers selling pre-paid shares in the upcoming season's harvest or a weekly subscription that represents that week's harvest. In all cases participants purchase a portion of the farm's harvest either by the season or by the week in return for what the farm is able to successfully grow and harvest. The largest subscription CSA, with over 4,000 families, is "Farm Fresh To You" established in 1992 in Capay Valley, California.
Some farms are dedicated entirely to CSA, while others also sell through on-farm stands, farmers' markets, and other channels. Most CSAs are owned by the farmers, while some offer shares in the farm as well as the harvest. Consumers have organized their own CSA projects, going as far as renting land and hiring farmers. Many CSAs have a core group of members that assists with CSA administration. Some require or offer the option of members providing labor as part of the share price.
Some CSA's have evolved into social enterprises employing a number of local staff, improving the lot of local farmers and educating the local community about organic/ecologically responsible farming. Australia's "Food Connect" is a unique social enterprise that is now competing with the major supermarkets. Unfortunately, nothing comparable exists yet in the USA, an excellent opportunity for the entrepreneurally-minded.
Typically, CSA farms are small, independent, labor-intensive, family farms. By providing a guaranteed market through prepaid annual sales, consumers essentially help finance farming operations. This allows farmers to not only focus on quality growing, it can also somewhat level the playing field in a food market that favors usually large-scale, industrialized agriculture over local food. Vegetables and fruit are the most common CSA crops. Many CSAs practice ecological, organic or biodynamic agriculture, avoiding pesticides and inorganic fertilizers (Indeed, if people wanted to eat pesticides and herbicides, there is no need to go anywhere else but the local supermarket to achieve that result). Nonetheless, the cost of a share is usually competitively priced when compared to the same amount of vegetables conventionally-grown, and sometimes even lower, partly because the cost of distribution is lowered.
Method of distribution is a distinctive feature in CSA. In the U.S. and Canada, shares are usually provided weekly, with pick-ups on a designated day and time. CSA subscribers often live in towns and cities - local drop-off locations, convenient to a number of members, are organized, often at the homes of members. Shares are also usually available on-site at the production site(s).
CSA is different from buying clubs and home delivery services, where the consumer buys a specific product at a predetermined price. CSA members purchase only what the farm is able to successfully grow and harvest, in essence CSA members share some of the growing risk with the farmer. If the strawberry crop is not successful, the CSA member will share the burden of the crop failure by not receiving strawberries for the season or receiving lower quality strawberries. CSA members are also more actively involved in the growing and distribution process, through shared newsletters and recipes, farm visits, farm work-days, advance purchases of shares, and picking up their shares.
An advantage of the close consumer-producer relationship is increased freshness of the produce, because it does not have to be shipped long distances. The CSA approach is definitely in tune with "locavorisme", the idea that we should eat food that is produced locally. The close proximity of the farm to the members also helps the environment by reducing pollution caused by transporting the produce. CSA's often include recipes and farm news in each box. Tours of the farm and work days are announced. Over a period of time, consumers get to know who is producing their food, and what production methods are used.
They can often even influence what is done and how, thus getting products that suits them optimally, and almost as good as what they could have grown in their own backyards or on their own rooftops.
Share prices can vary dramatically depending on location. Variables also include length of share season, and average quantity and selection of food per share. As a rough average, in North America, a basic share may be $350-500 for a season, for 18-20 weeks (June to October), with enough of each included crop for at least two people (perhaps 8-12 common garden vegetables).
Seasonal eating is implied, as shares are usually based on the outdoor growing season, which means a smaller selection at the beginning and perhaps the end of the period, as well as a changing variety as the season progresses. Some CSA programs offer different share sizes, also, a choice of share periods (eg. full-season and peak season). Of course, here, people living in climate-privileged areas have much greater choices than, say, people living in Alaska, or in between.
In conclusion, nothing can ever beat growing your own food and eat it too.
If that was fundamentally the only thing good enough for the sole physician to ever get not one, but TWO Nobel Prizes, Pr Dr Otto Warburg (whose specialty, incidentally, was cancer), there must have been a reason. A very simple one: He knew things most of us don't know!
And fortunately, today, the necessary information has been made available to us by a man who has widely been hailed as "the Einstein of Nutrition", Pr Dr T. Colin Campbell.
However, if you don't grow your own food in your own Organic & Sustainable Garden, there is no doubt that the next best thing is CSA shares. Actually, if your CSA involvement is high, then ideally the two approaches could somewhat merge, and become almost one and the same. So, if you don't have your own Organic & Sustainable Garden in your own backyard, rooftop or Community Garden space, CSA shares are clearly the way to go!
The resources listed in the present article will allow you to locate CSAs in your vicinity. And even allow you to start your own, if needs tobeed to!
Remember, "We are what we eat" and "Let thy food be thy medicine". So, in the end, what will make the difference between health and chronic or acute illness for you and your family will always boil down to one issue: What you eat, and the way you eat!
You now have the knowledge : Act upon it before it is too late!
References and Sources :
Urgenci, an international platform of CSA movementsThe Robyn van En CSA CenterNew Farm CSA articleNational Agricultural Library of the U.S. Department of Agriculture CSA resourcePDF History of CSAIntroduction to CSA and Farm Supported Communities provided by the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening AssociationNW Michigan growers Links to CSA resources, conferences, educational opportunitiesCSA-L CSA-L Listserve for CSA Farmer Information Exchange=========================================
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