Support from city folk takes root on the farm

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

A new way of farming is quietly sowing seeds of change. It has brought new life to family farms in Illinois, let city dwellers cultivate deep relationships with the people who grow their food in Rochester, N.Y., and allowed new farms to sprout up in Tulsa. The ultimate harvest may be the preservation of the family farm.

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) has grown from a few pioneers in the late 1980s to as many as 1,700 farms that feed about 340,000 families a week, according to Local Harvest, a Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Web site that tracks CSAs and farmers markets.

Here's how it works: For $13 to $25 a week, a family buys a share of a nearby farm's yearly harvest. Each week the family gets a box of vegetables <>

The number of CSA operations is only a tiny fraction of the 2.1 million U.S. farms counted in the 2002 Census of Agriculture. But they represent a new way of keeping small farmers on the land in an era of agricultural consolidation. Every year, CSA farmers figure out how many shares their harvest can support <>

Robyn Van En Center for CSA Resources Click National CSA Farm Directory www.csacenter.org Jim and Diann Moore were on the verge of losing their nearly 100-year-old farm in Watseka, Ill., when the Prairieland CSA in Champaign-Urbana came looking for a new farmer in 2003. "My husband was working road construction, I was working in a grocery store (and) we'd spent our boys' savings accounts," Diann Moore says.