Community Supported Agriculture or CSA is quickly becoming a direct marketing alternative for small-scale growers. In a CSA system, the farmer grows food for a group of shareholders (or subscribers) who pledge to buy a portion of the farm's crop that season. This arrangement gives growers up-front cash to finance their operation and higher prices for produce, since the middleman has been eliminated. Besides receiving a weekly box or bag of fresh, high-quality produce, shareholders also know that they're directly supporting a local farm (1).

Most CSAs have between 35 and 200 members, and the average CSA farm is about 35 acres. A typical offering would hold 5-10 pounds of food per week, or enough for 2 or 3 people. Prices run from $10 to $35 per week, with the average share costing $346 for 22 weeks of food. CSA costs seem reasonable. One detailed three-year study showed sharers would have paid 37% more at their supermarket for conventionally grown food (2).

For more on this topic copy this address and paste it into your browser: http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/csa.html#intro

-- Daren Henderson (TryChange@aol.com), April 15, 1999