Inside the CSA Phenomenon

One of the biggest recent changes to the local food scene has been the growth of CSAs, community supported agriculture groups that bring producer and consumer together. Author and public policy analyst Jamie Swift, himself a subscriber to one CSA, takes a thoughtful look at the phenomenon – its power and potential, but also the complications of going mainstream.

I’m all lost in the supermarket

I can no longer shop happily

– The Clash

Most of us, certainly those under sixty, would have trouble recalling a time when we didn’t get most of our food from those artfully-designed outlets where nothing was ever out of season. Food industry futurists predict that personal “loyalty cards” will soon be generating customized audio advertising on supermarket Klever-Karts, directing shoppers to their favourite fare.

The twenty-first century supermarket is a classic example of free market efficiency. A stunning array of goods, from raw produce to ready-to-eat “meal solutions” for people on the go. Cheap food and massive choice.

“When you vote daily in the supermarket,” wrote Milton Friedman, the influential economist who liked to imagine unregulated capitalism as a form of perfect freedom, “you get precisely what you voted for and so does everyone else.”

Despite Friedman’s curiously ambiguous logic, people are starting to line up for a new system of food distribution called community supported agriculture. Even though you pay more than you do at the Price Chopper and have little choice in what you get, CSAs are becoming increasingly popular.

So popular, in fact that the CSA farms in the Kingston area – some prefer to call them community shared agriculture, rather than community supported agriculture – all have waiting lists. “I just can’t do any more than I do now,” shrugs Titia Posthuma as she sweeps up some scraps that have fallen off her vegetable display at the Kingston public market. A hand-lettered sign beside the carrots says: “You bet it’s organic! Ravensfield Organic Produce, Maberly.”

Posthuma, an intense, wise woman who runs a one-acre CSA operation and a Kingston market stall, has a waiting list of people who want a hamper of her produce every week during the growing season. When she started her CSA, friends in nearby Perth had no problem lining up 33 customers ready to pay $240 or $440 in advance in exchange for a weekly cornucopia of fresh produce.

“You share the risk,” she explains, adjusting her straw hat with calloused hands, “and you support the concept.”

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CSA farmers hereabouts exude a confident optimism. Their operations are small, more plots than fields. They’re more likely to use rototillers than combines or even tractors. But what they lack in size and capital, they make up for in energy and enthusiasm.

And they know their numbers are growing across North America, just as in eastern Ontario. They see their micro-operations as the wave of the future, a subversive yet practical alternative to an industrial agriculture system firmly in the claw of giant outfits like Sobey’s (owner of Price Chopper, IGA and Foodland), Cargill and something called the Altria Group.

While the name Kraft is instantly recognizable as the biggest food and drink company in North America and number two globally, Kraft’s parent company has adopted a deliberately obscure name. Altria used to be called Philip Morris but changed its tobacco-tainted name, as it noted, “to better clarify its identity as the owner of food and tobacco companies that manage some of the world’s most successful brands.” Unlike CSA farmers who grow food, the dominant players manage brands in a sector where Wal-Mart – famous for low prices and wages – is now the world’s largest food retailer.

The CSA producers around Kingston are swimming upstream.  They’re mostly young, certainly younger than an aging farmer population struggling with the cost/price pressures relentlessly squeezing mainstream agriculture. According to Statistics Canada, the number of farmer operators under 35 years of age has been declining since at least 1991. The 35-to-54 age group is decreasing as well. Meanwhile, the average age of farmers as a whole continues its rise, increasing from 49.9 in 2001 to 52.0 a mere five years later. Titia Posthuma, the oldest CSA farmer in the Kingston area, is 51.

CSA operators are conscious romantics, their curious blend of idealism and pragmatism fuelling a rapidly growing movement.

Emily Dowling, 25, has spent the last few years gardening and learning about CSA operations before launching her own on the family’s Howe Island Farm. She spends most of her time down in the dirt, opting for manual over mechanical labour.

“I don’t enjoy being on a tractor all day,” says the operator of Root Radical CSA, adding that she wants to work the soil intensively, building it up. She has no illusions about this being a “lifestyle.” 

“I’m pretty practical; you have to be,” she says. “But you also have to be a bit of an idealist to stay motivated to work this hard every day.”

Dowling describes a Quebec CSA farm with 240 members and hopes that Root Radical will some day offer fruit, meat, berries and honey in addition to vast range of vegetables she and her partner grow on an acre-and-a-half plot. Her CSA has 50 shares that sell for $550-$650 according to income. Most of the members are from Kingston, picking up their weekly hamper at a north end community garden. She sold out her shares this year. Though she may have a few more on offer next season, she is close to her upper limit.

The regular contact with the people who eat her produce is one of the things that Dowling finds most appealing about this new way of selling and buying food: “Participation is critical to the success of CSAs. You have to have people involved.”

Participation seems to be a crucial ingredient in the growing popularity of CSAs.

It’s one thing to pass a few moments at a farmers’ market, chatting to your regular egg or vegetable producer. It’s even more rewarding to invest in a farm operation before the growing season starts, knowing that you’ll share in the bounty to come. There’s clearly an element of trust involved because you’re counting on the people who do the cultivating, planting, weeding, harvesting, and myriad other jobs to come across with the goods. Naturally, this trust requires some sort of personal relationship with the grower, or perhaps with a friend who told you about the grower. It’s all about one-on-one, personal relationships.

Indeed, CSA lore has it that the concept was inspired by an alternative agriculture model from Japan.  With the growth of industrial scale agriculture, people started to worry about the erosion of local self-sufficiency and declining farm populations. Food imports were skyrocketing. So teikei emerged. Though the word apparently means “link-up” or “co-operation” or “joint business,” CSA people usually talk about it in terms of  “putting the farmers’ face on food.” Emily Dowling’s Root Radical Rows web site describes it as “face-to-face.”

“Trust is a huge part of it,” says Ian Stutt, 29, of Patchwork Gardens, a three-person CSA with 21 members eating produce from a four-acre operation near Battersea. “We get those familiar faces every Saturday when they come to pick up their vegetables.”

Patchwork also maintains a stall at the Kingston market, where the Asian green mix of tatsoi, arugula, red mustard, kale, and mizuna is especially popular.

Contrast this to your typical supermarket experience. You’re in a spotless, spiritless place designed by teams of marketing specialists and behavioural psychologists to goad people towards the most profitable products. It doesn’t invite neighbourly chats. Indeed, you’re more likely to overhear one of those heated spats involving harried parents trying to deal with kids who are in tears because they can’t have some product deliberately placed at eye-level that they’ve seen on TV. According to one study, fully 10 per cent of a two-year-old’s nouns are brand names.

And trust? People are increasingly wary of an industrial food system offering end-of-aisle displays of apple juice labelled “product of Canada.” The juice may in fact originate in China, where there are even fewer controls of chemical biocides than here. While fruit may be rotting just down the road, well-known brands of cheap supermarket apple juice contain concentrate from China... along with Canadian water, packaging and advertising.

That’s one reason why, every Saturday, the people at Patchwork Gardens have to apologize to people who want to cut out the middleman, shorten the supply chain, and get in on their CSA. They simply can’t handle the demand. Patchwork’s Eric Williams, 32, describes the little enterprise as “hugely rewarding.”

“There’s just so much satisfaction to it. We get direct feedback. People feel like they’re part of a community. When you’re a member of a CSA you’re part of a bigger project.”

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Community supported agriculture finds itself at a watershed. And the local farmers who run CSAs know it. They have to face the issue of going mainstream.

“It’s been coming for a long time,” says Titia Posthuma, who feels it’s time CSAs went mainstream. Adds Emily Dowling: “I don’t think there’s anything stopping CSAs from going mainstream. People are mostly receptive. At this point the main barrier is that not enough people are out there producing.”

True, to a point. With a handful of local CSAs operating, the supply side of the equation is an obstacle to a breakthrough. Stutt figures that if 20 per cent of Kingston households were part of hundred-member CSAs, the area would need 250 good-sized vegetable farms.

“It’s going to be a long haul,” he admits.

But what about the demand side? In straight business terms, a fifth of the Kingston market is huge. How to reach beyond those already wary of the unsustainability of industrial agriculture? How to get them out of the supermarket trance?

This would mean confronting what farm organizations have been lamenting for decades, the fact that government policy and popular expectations are all about cheap food. Today’s small-scale producers running CSAs sell produce that can’t compete in straight price terms with what’s on offer at the Price Chopper. That stuff is based on cheap labour, cheap energy and massive economies of scale.

What’s more, CSAs are up against the flash and grab of advertising and consumer culture. Lots of people really like supermarkets. They comb the colourful flyers every week, searching for this or that bargain before driving around to load up on the stuff. And the grocery list is more than fresh, seasonal vegetables. It also includes the cheese and other dairy products, eggs, meat, and grain-derived goods that were once produced locally.

Isn’t it a pipe dream to contemplate beating Kraft Velveeta, Altria Inc. and the cheap food system at its own game?

CSA producers and their local food activist supporters think they have the answer. “What’s now mainstream agriculture can’t continue to be mainstream,” insists Eric Williams, invoking the dark truths about peak oil.

Local food activists believe that the relentless rise of energy prices will spell the end of a system in which it makes economic sense to ship Chilean grapes in refrigerated jumbo jets and trucks that produce several pounds of greenhouse gas for each pound of produce delivered to the supermarket. When that oil-based system crashes, places that haven’t built up food self-sufficiency will be in hot water. 

Still, the challenge is huge. It involves persuading people to imagine moving away from a system where they’ve become accustomed to a superabundance of fast, cheap, easy-to-prepare, always-in-the-supermarket fare. Instead, they must consider the alternative of supporting local producers – and even paying money up front to do so.

The rewards are a less alienated form of consumption in which participation means more than pushing a Klever Kart at the Price Chopper. But even scaling up CSAs – and local operators say they don’t want to or can’t do so – would mean bigger operations. How much face-to-face familiarity would there be in a CSA with hundreds of members?

Lots of questions. No easy answers. Still, one place to start is with politics and public policy. Canadian governments have long supported agriculture. That support continues in an era when the farm sector is increasingly characterised by corporate concentration, a relentless trend to fewer, bigger farms. Perhaps subsidies to the powerful could be redirected. “A whole lot of factors have to change,” argues Williams. “Maybe the government should bring back agricultural extension agents. Maybe government should start helping younger farmers to buy land.”

Meanwhile, I’ll try to keep in touch with the rhythms of nature by staying with a CSA and buying local whenever possible, heading down to the public market to do so.

Jamie Swift is the author of ten books including, most recently, Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire. He’s the director of the Justice and Peace Office of the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul.