Community Supported Agriculture – CSA, and Fresh Food Delivery

Have you ever had salad greens fresh-picked from the field? Mixed greens, young spinach, pea sprouts, bok choi, only a washing away from their roots. These will change your view of salads forever.

On Saturday we drove 50 miles round trip to pick up our CSA ½ share. Our Chevy Volt delivered 207 mpg, on only ¼ gallon of gas, even over the hilly terrain of the Adirondacks.

CSA is short for Community Supported Agriculture: you buy a portion of the produce from a farm, paying up front to provide the essential capital to run the farm for the season and sharing in the risk of what will grow this season. In return you get your share of whatever grows – it’s intriguing each week to see what great things you will get to eat in the coming week, exploring new recipes or savoring old favorites.

Another benefit is interacting with the exciting young people who are becoming first-time farmers at Fledging Crow because CSA’s make it economically viable to be a farmer. You join the rapidly growing movement toward Sustainable Communities.  You can even volunteer to help out at the farm – it really is a community activity.

Many of the farms are operating organically, even if they don’t go through the expensive and time-consuming certification process, and using other sustainable methods. You get more choice in how your food is grown with the variety of practices, and the reputations of the individual farms. Some farmers will even customize for particular needs, such as allergies (topic for future posts).

Complementary farms are partnering to provide additional foods – we’ve bought an egg share at Mace Chasm Farm as well. Other CSA’s are providing a full year’s diet for their members, such as Essex Farm, as documented by Kristin Kimball in the book The Dirty Life.

You might ask, what about people who can’t afford to pay the upfront CSA membership fee. Because the farms are producing their bounty, thanks in part to the CSA fees, they can also sell retail to other people. Some, like Essex Farm, offer “a sliding scale for low income members.”

After you’ve experienced these fresh foods, greens from the supermarket, already turning brown when you get them home, and loaded with water from spraying on the shelves, or sealed plastic bags of greens often already wilting, will no longer seem attractive.

So, you’re thinking what does this have to do with transportation? Well, the name of the blog is Sustainable Transportation and Community, so this is easily within my planned scope, and you will hear more about these kinds of things in the future.

But transportation plays a key role in the food we eat, everything from getting the seeds to the farm, to plowing the fields, to distributing the farm’s bounty. For now I will focus on how my proposed transportation system could affect distribution of the bounty, and thus the whole market for food.

I mentioned the 50-mile drive every Saturday morning to pick up our CSA share, and the farmers had to drive their produce quite a distance to get to the farm market (the growing season in the heart of the Adirondacks is too short for most crops). It’s great to talk with the farmers, and meet and share with the other people who frequent the farm markets. But some days it isn’t convenient, what about people who can’t travel that distance, what about the time it takes from farming (although it may be a welcome change?). Of course the farm market is located to be near quite a few people, and for example, Essex Farm has people come pick up their share once a week.

But greens don’t stay fresh for a whole week, and the weather may not be conducive to picking the greens the day of the market.

What if your food could be delivered wherever you choose, when you want it. The farm markets can still operate for those who prefer them, but others of us can get our food transported to us.The mechanism I described for prescription pills can work here as well. In the next post I’ll expand on the impacts this might have on the food supply.