CSA offers a fresh food choice for consumers

The 21^st century is one of choice and information. In nearly every facet of life, variety and knowledge have become more and more accessible, from the things we read to the way we communicate to the way we heal and the foods we eat. Driven by environmental awareness and health concerns, the latter has become especially diverse in the past few years. Consumers not only have increasingly more options among the fruits and vegetables, grains and meats, but even the manner in which those products make it into the grocery bag, leading some to question if perhaps all cucumbers are created equal.

Seasons have all but disappeared from the produce section of most major grocery stores. Demand for year-round tomatoes and lemons and asparagus has expanded the reach of our appetites to truly global proportions. While Orange County might be under 18-inches of snow in February Southern California and Mexico are not. A trend in agriculture is gaining strength, though, that champions seasonality and locally sourced foods over the convenience of a year-round selection.

“When I was growing up I thought food came from the grocery store,” said Frank Gillan, who operates Retreat Farm in Rapidan with his wife Cindy. “You heard of farms and farmers but you never really understood where the food came from because you never saw them.”

Retreat and a number of small farms in the county have established CSAs or Community Supported Agriculture businesses to provide consumers with a very direct perspective on where their food comes from, as well as a stake in that year’s harvest. CSAs work by farmers soliciting a set number of customers to buy a share in the year’s crop in return for a weekly supply of whatever produce the farm happens to have in season that week.

“Basically it works nicely for the farmer because we can grow according to the population of the CSA, instead of planting a few crops and hoping they sell at the market,” said Gillan. “You know how many people are in your CSA and so you grow and give to them with a concrete base in mind. We enjoy it because it gives us a contact with the client population; once a week they’ll come to your farm and see where their food comes from and experience a farm. It’s an educational experience and education and nutrition go hand in hand.”

Running a CSA also provides early season capital to the farmer, who might otherwise have to finance his harvest before it makes it into the ground.

“Traditionally farmers have had to go to the bank in the winter for seed money,” said Georgia O’Neil of Tree and Leaf Farm in Unionville. “A CSA allows farmers to not have to do that by getting the money up front and allowing them to get through the year without the risk of a failed crop. That helps create the strong relationship with the customers, that shared risk.”

Perhaps the most unique aspect to buying into a CSA is the element of risk. The misty aisles of the grocery store produce section poses little threat beyond the occasionally over-ripened avocado or mealy apple, but with CSAs farmers and customers alike delight in the bounties and languish in the shortfalls.

“By buying into a CSA, a customer has a stake in that farm,” said Gillan. “The big agriculture companies and big farms that ship their produce all over the country have lost touch with the consumer.”

Often, the news about prices and income is grim coming out of industrial-sized agriculture, but smaller farms have isolated their niche and the trend is on the rise. Many of these small farmers come to farming from someplace else, a second career or a restart. The Gillans were social workers before arriving at Retreat Farm, Holly and James Hammond of Whisper Hill Farm in Culpeper County left hospitality and computer science careers and Kent and Evie Woods left marketing jobs in Wisconsin to start Liberty Mills Farm in Somerset.

“I think the rise in CSAs comes from a lot more awareness about health and safety and sustainability,” said Evie Woods. “People are concerned about where their food comes from and how it’s grown. For the farmer and the consumer, there’s no middle person; it’s direct marketing—the farmer grows it and the consumer picks it up. Plus seasonal food tastes better. It simply tastes better. People are starting to want something besides a tomato that traveled 2,500 miles, and may look perfect, but has no taste.”

Despite the proliferation of small farms and CSAs, the farmers don’t seem to mind the competition, but rather continue to see the existing grocery store produce aisle as their main competitor.

“We don’t really feel a sense of competition with the other small farms,” said Holly Hammond. “We need more farmers and we need more successful small farms. We feed a small percentage of the population and we can’t compete with Food Lion’s prices. But we’re good friends with the surrounding farming community; we’re all helping out each other.”

Major grocery stores hold contracts with industrial growers that place prices well below those of small farmers. Gillan, though, points out that the high number of different produce varieties often grown on small farms creates somewhat of an insurance plan larger farms won’t have access to.

“On the small scale you’re more diversified; you don’t have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak,” said Gillan, who estimates the number of crops he plants each year at around 100. “The monoculture of larger farmers has them growing either beef cattle, or dairy cattle, or pork or corn or soy beans, but rarely anything else. When bad things happen in nature and it becomes harder for your crop to grow, then it becomes harder for you to continue to meet the needs of what people are looking for from you. For example last year cucumbers didn’t do very well, so if I grew only cucumbers then I would be sunk. In any given year with working with nature you’re going to have bad years with some crops, but with the diversity we plant, we’ll have something pick up the slack and grow in excess.”

CSAs, though, represent simply one method of getting a small farm’s produce to the consumer. Farmers markets, like the one held in Orange on Saturday mornings, have seen similar growth with the rise of the smaller scale farms. Georgia O’Neil and Zachariah Lester of Tree and Leaf founded their farm on the back of a CSA in 2002, but have since shirked that model for the farmers markets of Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.

“When we were doing both [a CSA and the farmers markets] we found we were able to make more money at the markets,” said O’Neil, who said Tree and Leaf once did a 100-share CSA. “It made more sense to us to streamline and focus our energy on that and not spread ourselves too thin.”

O’Neil said she hopes to one day restart a CSA program, as it’s something she continues to believe in.

“The thing we were initially attracted to with the CSA, is that you’re being supported by your community,” said O’Neil. “You’re growing food for your local community and they’re eating seasonally right along with you…There’s a consciousness that’s being raised about where your food comes from, the health of the food, the planet and the soil. People are voting with their fork and putting their money where their month is, quite literally.”