I MAGINE RUNNING A BUSINESS in which you raise your own food, build good relations with neighbors, raise consciousness about sustainable growing--and help people move away from dependence on agribusiness and supermarket chains. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms allow people to support local farmers in producing healthy food, in season, for local consumption. In a CSA, a small number of shareholders (from 10 or so to 100 or more) pay a flat fee at the beginning of the growing season, then receive a share of garden produce each week.
Acorn community, 20 people who share income and housing on 72 acres in rural Virginia, has been considering a CSA business since our founding in 1993. Although we've produced abundant food in our garden each year, including enough to can, dry, and freeze for the winter, we never felt ready to launch a CSA as a business. That is, not until the spring of 1996 when Cricket joined. With eight years of gardening and experience running his own small hammock shop, Cricket possessed the skills needed to make CSA a reality. Moreover, starting a CSA in an intentional community had been his fervent dream for six years! After several months of meetings, schemes, and plans, we decided to go for it, moving an Acorn CSA program from wistful concept to tangled reality.
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We took advantage of living near 30-year-old Twin Oaks community, and used their local network of former members to find our first subscribers. Former communitarians naturally tend to have positive attitudes toward us and don't need much convincing of the benefits of avoiding pesticides and buying directly from local growers. We also posted flyers at natural food stores, garden suppliers, supermarkets, and other locations.
However, plenty of thorny issues had to be resolved. One was finances. Growers aren't known for getting rich, and as a young community we need money for land payments, buildings, tools, and many other expenses. Hammock-making has always been the backbone of Acorn's economy, with an average income of about $8 per hour. While we have a fairly successful business in tinnery (a craft item made from recycled cans), the other craft businesses we've tried haven't panned out. At times we've had computer programmers living with us who telecommuted for $30/hour, but our last programmer departed over a year ago.
However, we are committed to diversifying our income sources, including bringing them more into alignment with our ecological values. In spite of losing Cricket's hours from the hammock to the CSA business (he's our fastest hammock weaver), we declared our willingness to subsidize the CSA operation for the first few years if necessary. In addition, we were lucky to receive a $2000 grant from a supportive donor, enabling us to rebuild our greenhouse and replace our ailing rototiller just in time for our first season.
Our plan was to sell 10 full shares at $550, or their equivalent in half shares at $300 each. Full shares are expected to weigh a minimum of five to seven pounds each week; half shares, two to four pounds. We planned to offer mostly vegetables, plus occasional herbs, throughout a 30-week growing period from April to November. Our shareholder prospectus includes a schedule of what vegetables to expect when, but we warned everyone that this schedule would depend on cooperative weather, no unexpected bugs, and other factors. Joining a CSA as a shareholder means accepting the shortfalls as well as the bumper crops along with the growers.
Another challenge was the amount of contact we wanted to have with local folks. Increasing contact with people - demonstrating sustainable agriculture and helping people experience the connection from grower to table - is often a major aspect of running a CSA. But how much contact did we really want, given that our gardeners, including women, often prefer to work shirtless on hot days? Yet one of our goals was to make naturally-grown food accessible to local people, and we imagined some of our less-than-affluent shareholders might want to work off part of their share price, as is the case with most CSAs. We discussed this issue at length, finally agreeing to invite shareholders to open houses several times during the season.
However, our first open house was rained out. Nobody showed up to the second. It seemed that an announcement in our weekly CSA newsletter, A Cornucopia, wasn't enough to get people to show up. But the shirtless garden crew hasn't complained, and we have a work exchange agreement with a former member who has re-settled nearby, with whom there are not the same cultural barriers. Meanwhile, in spite of the absence of turnout for shareholder events, random phone surveys plus letters from shareholders revealed that they were tremendously pleased. In the best evidence yet of customer satisfaction, after the first week of produce deliveries we received about a dozen calls from friends of shareholders who also wanted to join. Since we were already full for 1997, they're on the waiting list for 1998.
The first month we produced barely enough to fill the shareholder baskets. If the winter hadn't been so mild and we hadn't overwintered carrots, kale, and turnips in the ground, we might have been in big trouble! As it was, the community itself received precious little of the early harvest, so that we could fulfill our delivery commitment to shareholders. So we stopped accepting new shareholders when we got to the equivalent of nine full shares. Now that we're in full season, both the community and the shareholders are awash in wonderfully fresh veggies! If we run low on produce this fall, we might give shareholders canned goods such as tomatoes and pickles to help fill out the orders. There's talk of eventually adding cut flowers as well.
One sacrifice we won't consider is using chemical fertilizers or pesticides to increase crop yield. Instead, we rely on raised beds; naturally pest-resistant seed varieties; occasional applications of botanicals; hard work; and tons of mulch - hay, sawdust, or even cardboard placed around plants to prevent weeds. We are not certified organic, and we're concerned about run-off from neighboring farmers who use commercial fertilizers and pesticides. But we're proud to tell our shareholders that we use only natural growing methods.
Our weekly newsletter for shareholders covers everything from favorite recipes to the politics of seed-saving. Because gardening is so weather-dependent, Cricket often doesn't know which vegetables will be harvested for the baskets until the day before delivery. There's always a last-minute rush to get that information into the newsletter.
On Fridays we deliver shares to Louisa, a small town nearby, and Tuesdays we deliver to Charlottesville, a larger college town about an hour away. In both cases, we drop off full baskets and pick up last week's empties at designated drop-off points.
Because CSAs do not receive the government subsidies allotted to mainstream growers and agribiz corporations, our cost per pound of food is significantly higher than its commercially grown equivalent in supermarkets. However, by eliminating middle people and selling direct, our shareholders pay less for our food than they would for its organically grown equivalent. In addition, our shareholders have the satisfaction of knowing they're helping a young community thrive. Now that our CSA is finally underway, we look forward to attracting additional enthusiastic gardeners and expanding our food business substantially in coming years.
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