Community Supported Agriculture
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a win-win propostion, and it is dead simple. Given today’s corporate agriculture, the creeping uncertainty of genetically modified organisms in our food supply, and the recent government dumbing-down of food safety laws, the time is right to look to your local farmer for your food.
CSA is a return to an old concept: you support a local grower, and the grower supplies you with locally grown, seasonal fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers; some even provide meats. This closed-loop system of farming - sales - distribution gives you the best of the seasons’ produce, and gives small-scale farmers an assured market for their crops. Most CSA farmers are local, organic growers, and virtually none are using GMO crops.
Generally speaking, you subscribe to a CSA organization and agree to buy a season’s worth of produce at a fixed price. Weekly, the CSA boxes up your produce, which they then drop off at a fixed location for you to retrieve; some actually deliver to your home, though this is rare. In effect, you are a shareholder of the farmers’ crops. If the season goes well, you benefit from a bounty of produce.
The CSA I belong to delivers so much produce that it cannot all be consumed in a week, so we split the share with another household — we alternate weeks, thus reducing the cost by half. Our CSA shipments started this week, and here is what was in our box.
This link will help you find a CSA near you, but it is by no means definitive. If you have a local farmers’ market, you might find a CSA right there.
Update from reader Donna: “here’s a little more direct resource…”
(The image is one I created using the Warhol technique from last week’s post!)
