On Friday of last week I gave a presentation on Community Supported Agriculture at the Mississippi Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association Conference in Philadelphia, Mississippi. I talked with a group of growers and extension agents about the CSA concept of sharing the risks and rewards of the growing season between farmers and their customers and about all the different ways farmers are putting that into practice. One of the coolest things out there is the Whole Diet CSA. Basically customers pay a flat fee at the beginning of the year and go to the farm and pick up whatever they will eat in that week. That includes fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, meat and grains. That’s right, members of these CSAs pick up all their food for the week, just like a grocery store that they have already paid for (without the aisles and aisles of processed food, of course). I am intrigued by this, mostly because it sounds insane. How do you plan for that? How do these farms grow grains on a small scale? Of course it isn’t crazy, it’s a food independent homestead expanded to feed an extended household. A whole diet CSA takes a special kind of customer, too. Someone who will make butter out of cream and yogurt and mozzarella out of milk, someone who mills their own grain and bakes bread. Against my know-better self, I have to say, it sounds so romantic! Perhaps five years from now, when we have it All Figured Out, you will see TCF launch a whole diet CSA.
For now, we are just trying to make our little CSA better and better. Our greatest challenge, in my opinion, is getting a more uniform harvest throughout the year so we always have enough of everything without having a mountain of sweet potatoes (or lettuce, or bok choi) that we don’t know what to do with [sideways glance to the 600 pounds of sweet potatoes packed in our front room]. We rely on farmers markets to absorb the variance in our production, but there are a lot of farms out there that just do CSA. Man, they must really have their act together! Despite all the things I don’t like about CSA (having to grow stuff that I know loses money, explaining to our wonderful members when we’ve had a crop failure) we plan to grow the CSA as a proportion of our business because
- We love having a deeper connection with our customers
- We can diversify the CSA more easily to include meat
- Farmers markets can be variable and unpredictable and take a lot of time away from the farm
- The CSA provides the greatest financial security
Of course, we can only expand the CSA because of awesome people like you who choose to be our members. Thank you for supporting us this year!
