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

[[File:Coop-domain.jpg|thumb|Thumbnailed image]|The cooperative domain name “.coop”]]

[[File:Category_csa.jpg|thumb|Thumbnailed image]|A homemade sign made by volunteers of an Ohio based CSA]]

Estimates show that approximately 1 billion people<ref>2012 estimate. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/2014/coopsegm/grace.pdf</ref> are today taking part in a cooperative system. May some of us be using our voices to shape our cooperative or, on the contrary, not actually aware that their are part of one , “the 1 member = 1 voice” system is, in fact, far from being reserved to the political left and second generation hippies. Indeed, more often that not, our banks or insurance providers are based on cooperative structures which have, for more efficiency, relegated the power of the cooperators to smaller groups of cooperators, organised as representatives (often being payed back for their involvement with bonuses and higher salarie). By browsing through various large scale cooperatives, we can in fact identify hierarchical structures (which the cooperative model primarily aims to shield from) which highly remind us of top-down corporative organisations, with one distinct variation: there is no selling of goods or services to “customers” by rather to “cooperators”. The difference seems only to be linguistic.   

== The risks of not sticking to the primary principles of a cooperative, the case of USA startups<ref>https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/dining/csa-farm-share-community-supported-agriculture.html</ref> ==  

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>

== Annexe: creating a CSA, where to start?<ref>Taken from the [https://urgenci.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/CSA4EUrope_Handbook.pdf/ European Handbook on Community Supported Agriculture]</ref>==

<u><b>Where and how to find people to from a group of consumers?</u></b>

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