When Community-Supported Agriculture Is Not What It Seems

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/dining/csa-farm-share-
community-supported-agriculture.html?_r=1

A New York Times article by Julia Moskin

Last Tuesday, a farm-to-table subscription service called Local Roots NYC dropped off boxes at pickup spots in New York City including a cafe, a brew pub and the offices of BuzzFeed.

Alongside locally grown rainbow chard, romaine lettuce and beets, some members got bottles of olive oil from Italy or bars of chocolate and bags of dried pasta, both Brooklyn-made. From Rustic Roots, an organic-food delivery service in the tristate area, members could receive fruit boxes stacked with oranges, pineapples and avocados.

Although both companies use the term “C.S.A.,” community-supported agriculture, to describe their service, the presence of a middleman between the farmer and the customer is precisely what traditional C.S.A.s are designed to avoid. And since olives and oranges do not grow in this region, those products provide no direct income to local farmers, precisely the people the C.S.A. was invented to benefit.

From Food First's electronic newsletter:

Converting lawns to organic gardens—one garden at a time

Imagine community supported agriculture in the community. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Community Roots challenges the assumption that commercial-scale vegetable production requires the mass of land only available in rural settings, as it has successfully transformed a number of neighborhood yards into bountiful organic gardens.

Kipp Nash founded Community Roots as a way to foster connection within communities by weaving together traditional ways of rural life into an urban setting and utilizing valuable resources to produce local, sustainable models of food production.

Since its inception in 2005, Community Roots has grown to include eight production gardens, totaling just under a half acre, with more in the works. In exchange for use of the land, Community Roots, transforms the space into a highly productive mini-farm, plants and tends a variety of vegetables, and harvests the produce, which is enough to feed 25 families. The bounty is shared between the landowner and Community Roots who then markets their share a number of ways, including at the Boulder County Farmers Market and through community supported agriculture shares.

The donor of the first plot was one of Kipp’s neighbors, followed by another, and then another, with each successive donor inspired to participate by the transformation seen in the previous. Following on its success in establishing an urban multi-plot farm and neighborhood-based CSA in the Martin Acres neighborhood of Boulder, Community Roots is also extending its projects to include CSA Outreach, which will involve low-income, food insecure families in the CSA program; Community Fruits, which will work with homeowners to harvest and distribute under-utilized fruit from residential trees; and another Community Roots Food Project in the Newlands neighborhood of Boulder.

For more information, visit the Community Roots website: http://www.communityrootsboulder.com/.