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.

Super Storm Sandy Spells Disaster

My wife and I were up in the Adirondacks, preparing for a Halloween celebration with our kayaking friends, when the rapidly emerging threat of Super Storm Sandy forced us to drive back to Long Branch, NJ to prepare our home for the flood. We moved everything portable from the ground floor upstairs, and put the furniture and exercise equipment up on blocks because they were too heavy to get up the stairs:  we anticipated the loss of our carpet, our upright piano (which we couldn’t move off the first floor), and our 19-year-old Camry – we thought we were well prepared. Then we left for 3 days of mandatory evacuation; fortunately we could be near our daughters in Pennsylvania.

We returned to find there had been 19” of water on our first floor, but we were shocked to discover how unprepared we really were! 

• We spent a week ripping out the bottom 4’ of sheetrock, molding, and insulation throughout the first floor.
• Our furnace and hot water heater had to be replaced, along with all the electrical outlets.
• We had to buy a new washer and dryer. 
• Doors had split and had to be replaced. 
• And of course everything had to be cleaned and disinfected to prevent mold, the scourge of flooding. 
• We were without power for 11 days, but fortunately we had a fireplace, a gas grill, and our daughter lent us plenty of candles so we camped in our own house. 

We had planned to do all the carpentry ourselves, but by the time we finished ripping out the sheetrock and insulation, it was clear this was too big a job for the two of us. Fortunately, there were contractors working with our neighbors and they agreed to take over.  I can’t possibly convey how much we appreciate these excellent workers who were diverted from their normal commercial work to help us, and so many others.

This is how I came to have a Chevy Volt, which we love, and a new Yamaha Clavinova, an electric piano that sounds like a concert grand, that can be taken apart and moved upstairs if that becomes necessary again (heaven forbid).

All of this took 2 ½ months, so have just started to get out lives back.

Please don’t take this as complaining – we are incredibly lucky! Many of our neighbors didn’t take the warnings seriously (Irene didn’t flood us after all, although it was close, and those early warnings were just as dire) and so they lost everything on their first floors. Many people only had one floor, so they lost everything in their houses. You would not believe the enormous piles of refuse created by just one house when you have to throw out everything on your first floor! Fortunately, the town of Long Branch hired huge front loaders and trucks to haul away the 8’ high mountains.

And only 2 miles from here by the ocean, entire homes and businesses were washed away, covered with sand, and generally ruined. So people lost not only their houses and their belongings, but their jobs, and in some cases they can’t return to the disaster area even now, 2 ½ months later. So that’s part of why we feel so lucky!

Super Storm Sandy proved that our current system of infrastructure and architecture is obsolete. As you will see, my proposals cover opportunities to dramatically improve both the infrastructure and architecture.

Thousands of workers came in from around the country to get power back. They complained about the obsolete equipment and the lack of computer support essential for restoration – but they did a great job in the face of a very challenging disaster, even living in a tent city erected quickly after Sandy. Many of the power wires are on poles, and thus subject to wind, and the buried wires are subject to flooding. Each repair requires a team of people and equipment to find the problem and go there to fix it, a time-consuming and expensive task.

What if the wires and equipment were in a protected environment, and what if there were a robust grid so that one failure didn’t cut off power to a whole neighborhood, and what if failures could be located automatically, and what if many failures could be fixed remotely?  This may sound like science fiction, but it’s what we designed into the telephone network decades ago, so the technology has been available for a long time! By the way, one of the cellular networks continued to work, but not the other one – fortunately my wife’s iPhone was on the working cell network, as was the iPad I bought just 2 weeks before the storm, so we stayed connected. The water, natural gas, and sewer systems didn’t go down after Sandy, so you see it is possible.

What if the buildings weren’t as subject to flooding, and what if the damage could be quickly and inexpensively repaired?

What if the transportation system wasn’t as vulnerable to flooding, and what if the vehicles could have gone off to higher ground by themselves instead of staying to be ruined – after Sandy, all 3 of the parking spots by us had drowned cars in them waiting for the insurance companies to tow them away.

As my ideas unfold in blog posts to come, you will see how this sort of resilient infrastructure is an integral, and natural, part of my overall system proposals.