How CSAs Took Root in the U.S.

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs boomed during the Covid pandemic as city dwellers and suburbanites across the country found themselves avoiding grocery stores and restaurants and spending a lot more time cooking at home, as well as looking for ways to support struggling small businesses, including local farms. For an average annual fee of $400 to $700 per year, consumers buy "shares" from local farms in exchange for boxes of fresh produce throughout a given season. Those boxes run the gamut, offering everything from vegetables, meat, dairy, and flowers to wine and even gelato. But the concept is hardly new: Let’s turn our attention to the radical history of CSAs.

International Sowing

There’s no consensus on the origins of the CSA concept, but similar community farm initiatives gained momentum in Japan, Chile, and across Europe after World War II. In the mid-1960s, a group of Japanese women, concerned about the safety and quality of increasingly industrialized, chemically intensive agriculture, approached a local farm family with an idea to create a farmer-consumer partnership involving direct supplies of organic foods, and the teikei movement (referred to as Japan’s CSA movement) was born. In the late ’70s, proto-CSA models began to take hold in Europe, inspired largely by the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner and his 1920s teachings on biodynamic agriculture and "associative economics," as well as Chilean agricultural unions and cooperatives that sprung up in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Civil Rights and Farm Commandments

At the height of the civil rights movement, Booker T. Whatley, a Black horticulturist and agriculture professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, pioneered solutions for struggling Black farmers, who were often denied loans from the federal government. Whatley eventually published these ideas, gleaned from decades of research, in the 1987 handbook How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres, which is still embraced by small-scale farmers. In it, he put forth a list of "10 Farm Commandments," the second of which is what he called a "pick-your-own operation." The idea, according to Whatley, is to charge local community members a fee, in exchange for which they can come to the farm and pick their own produce. He also advocated "clientele membership clubs," where customers paid upfront for a season of food as a way of ensuring the farm’s prosperity.

CSAs Sprout in New England

Despite all of its antecedents, the CSA model popularized in the United States is most commonly associated with Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, and Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, both founded in the mid-’80s. Swiss biodynamic farmer Jan Vander Tuin and American organic farmer Robyn Van En developed a CSA program at Van En’s Indian Line Farm that distributed orchard-grown apples (as well as cider) to community members who’d bought farm shares. Vander Tuin and Van En also considered questions of ownership and equity: Who had a stake in the CSAs themselves? How should wages be set? In New Hampshire, Temple-Wilton cofounders Anthony Graham, Lincoln Geiger, and Trauger Groh were asking similar questions at the community farm’s inception.

This Week’s Box

Today, there are nearly 10,000 CSA programs that serve individual consumers, food-aid groups, and restaurants across the country. CSA membership hit an all-time high during the pandemic, with a number of farmers telling Minnesota Public Radio last year that they regularly turn away customers. But the CSA boom has not been without growing pains, and many farms report struggling with retention rates. In 2021, the CSA Innovation Network declared an official CSA Week, with resources for both farmers and customers to promote sign-ups, and states and cities are rolling out programs that allow shoppers to pay for CSA shares with federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, making the farm-to-consumer model more widely accessible.

Top image of Robyn Van En (center) and others at Indian Line Farm by Clemens Kalischer, Courtesy the Estate of Clemens Kalischer

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