The what-how-why of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): Difference between revisions

Though most cooperatives adapt their organisational structures to meet their own specific needs, the coop system is fundamentally based on 7 founding notions: the Rochdale Principles. Originally wrote in England in 1844 by the 28 founders of an early worker co-operative food store<ref>This store gave the members of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers access to goods they would otherwise not have access to, now being left unemployed as a result of the mechanisation of work</ref>, this set of principles paved the way to our contemporary cooperative movement. (click on each reference tag for more detailed principles)

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A food cooperative is directly owned by both its employees and its members. People who shop at the cooperative typically pay a yearly nominal fee and share the work (accounting, selling, merchandising, cleaning) fairly throughout the year. In general, membership is open to any community member, with stores adopting official policies of nondiscrimination. Often distributing food items from a range of local farms and organic products dealers, these structures are more often found in cities and urban environments, where access to farms is limited.

Community Supported Agriculture (otherwise known as crop sharing) is a partnership between a farm and consumers where the risks and rewards of farming are shared. Often, CSAs allow the consumer to subscribe to the harvest of a certain farm or group of farms. CSA is a solidarity contract, based on a financial commitment from consumers, who pay all of their consumption in advance over a defined period. This system therefore operates on the principle of consumer confidence and responsibility.

These two programs often work in concert in rural areas, and are associated with each other by consumers.

Consumers participate in or may even run the scheme working closely with the farmer who produces what they want.  

A farmer sets up, organises and maintains a CSA. The farmer might also recruit subscribers. The members financially subscribe, with little other involvement.

Local residents set up a CSA and hire a farmer to grow crops. Shareholders/subscribers control most of the management.

Farmer-driven CSA where two or more farms cooperate to supply its members with a greater variety of produce. This model allows individual farms to specialise in the most appropriate farming for that holding (larger farms may concentrate on field scale production, smaller farms on specialist crops and upland farms on rearing livestock).

== What problems does CSA seek to address?<ref name=handbook>Notes from the ‘<i>European Handbook on Community Supported Agriculture Sharing Experiences</i>’. Note: The document has been funded by, among other, the European Commission’s program for life-long learning</ref>==

== Benefits of CSA<ref name=handbook /> ==

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<li>Consumers benefit from receiving fresh food from a known source</li>

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<li> A more secure income which improves business planning and time to concentrate on farming</li>

Cooperative businesses have lower failure rates than traditional corporations and small businesses, after the first year of startup, and after 5 years in business. About 10% of cooperatives fail after the first year while 60 to 80% of traditional businesses fail after the first year. After 5 years, 90% of cooperatives are still in business, while only 3 to 5% of traditional businesses are still operating after 5 years. This is often because of the many people involved in starting a cooperative and the high level of community support for cooperatives.  

Cooperative businesses stabilise communities because they are community-based business anchors; and distribute, recycle, and multiply local expertise and capital within a community. Since most cooperatives are owned and controlled by local residents, they are more likely to promote community growth than an investor-oriented firm (a conventional supermarket promising jobs to a community, which is often one of the main arguments).   

“<i>The farmer lives outside the city but sends weekly emails about life on the farm and hosts and open house each summer. Occasionally, he visits. He's also extremely responsive to members. And there is community at the distribution site in the form of members who come back year after year. I think that's the real secret of CSAs—the genuine, non-corporate ones—they blend first-rate produce with a way to feel connected. It's the exact opposite of ordering something on a website.</i>”

One of the oldest examples of the concept of CSA emerged in the 1960s in Japan. At the time, mothers of Japanese families worried about seeing agriculture industrialise with a massive use of chemicals (in 1957, the first victims of Minamata, poisoned with mercury, were declared). These mothers then founded in 1965 the first <i>teikei</i> (meaning in Japanese “cooperation”, “collaboration” or “partnership”) which primarily concerned dairy cooperatives. The principle of operation is as follows: in exchange for the purchase by subscription of the farmer's harvest, the latter agrees to provide food grown without chemicals.

Alabama born and raised Dr. Booker T. Whatley is best known for his “regenerative farming system” as opposed to the term CSA. In combination with the direct marketing concept of <i>pick-your-own</i> (PYO), a customer harvesting operation managed by farmers and growers. Dr. Whatley also popularised the concept of subscription buyer's club for small farmers starting in the mid-50's. By doing so he also aimed to "generate an agrarian black middle class" in the post WWII USA.  

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The first known CSA in Europe, <i>Les Jardins de Cocagne</i>, was founded in 1978 near Geneva, Switzerland. In the late 70s and through the 80s, only a few other CSA initiatives were started. Around the turn of the Millennium however the CSA movement gathered steam and started to spread. From then on we can observe a tremendous boom of the practice, largely in France thanks the elaboration of the AMAP (the french CSA) charter.

== CSA, a farming system associated with 2 core social movements ==

*Food sovereignty is a term coined by members of the Via Campesina (LVC) in 1996<ref>La Via Campesina comprises 182 local and national organisations in 81 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Altogether it represents about 200 million farmers. Built on a strong sense of unity, solidarity between these groups, it defends peasant agriculture for food sovereignty as a way to promote social justice and dignity and strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture that destroys social relations and nature.</ref>, and asserts the right of people to define their own food systems. Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.

*The idea and practice of "solidarity economics" emerged in Latin America in the mid-1980s and blossomed in the mid to late 90s. Growing dissatisfaction with the culture of the dominant market economy led groups of more economically privileged people to seek new ways of generating livelihoods and providing services. From largely a middle-class" counter-culture" - similar to that in the Unites States since the 1960's- emerged projects such as consumer cooperatives, cooperative child care and people’s healthcare initiatives that are complementary to existing national health systems currently becoming eroded by the crisis, housing cooperatives, intentional communities, and eco-villages. There were often significant class and cultural differences between these two groups. Nevertheless, the initiatives they generated all shared a common set of operative values: cooperation, autonomy from centralised authorities, and participatory self-management by their members.

To this day, Ecuador 🇪🇨 and Bolivia 🇧🇴 have both included Solidarity Economy and Food sovereignty in their constitutions.

== The question of land ownership for CSA ==

In many countries, the key issue for young would-be CSA farmers is the difficulties that they face in terms of access to land.  

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Connecting customers and farmers is a tricky business. It demands time, research and effort on both sides. Even after much research, it is still hard to know who and how to take part in this system. As expected in a liberal system of goods and services, many (often US based) companies have swooped in as “relay” between farmers and consumers. Often providing software, these companies have made it more efficient and simple to organise structures (buying vegetable boxes online, secured payment, live schedule etc) but have actually given shape to a system of intermediaries against which “CSAs” were originally fighting for. Indeed, these new companies<ref>*Peapod, FreshDirect, LocalRoots, Farmigo, etc…</ref> need to make profit (which is not a bad thing in essence) but therefore take a percentage of every transaction as well as using the term CSA as a sort of label to advertise their products — which is easy for them to do as the CSA system is decentralised and therefore has no real legal status and representative body. Hence, as customers are offered a large and confusing variety of providers, they are increasingly led to believe that they are supporting multiple farms at once. To that end, the CSA system comes to be weakened. To prevent these types of predicaments, the US state of California included the definition of the CSA into its legal system, it is therefore protecting any use of the term by other parties for profit purposes.<ref>http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB224&showamends=false</ref>

Again, a central issue is the idea of “comfort”. If delivery service LocalRoots argues that customers are more likely to quit CSAs because of the lack of food options and lack of flexibility provided by original CSAs, the fact it that contributing to a resilient food system relies also on the willingness for customers to relinquish some of their comfort and accept the fact that they cannot access the same variety they would in a conventional supermarket. To that end, with one of the founding principles of Community supported agricultural practices being education, CSA communities, activists and farmers must educate the public to the idea of seasonality, good/bad harvest, weather etc. as being a integral part of our future diets.

== Notes ==