Farm Share
The alternative for when times get weird
I have run a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture and NOT the white nationalist racist group Confederate States of America) for about 28 years. This is an alternative way for some people to buy food straight from the farm. They buy a share, pay up front and get a box of food weekly or biweekly. In a traditional CSA the member gets whatever the farm wants to supply. It could be shares where beets and chard are featured for weeks on end. In my CSA my members get to pick out 5 items from a list I send out weekly and they build a custom share. This prevents burn out and unused food because a member simply cannot take another week of beets or asparagus or peas. It’s a good system, I like it and my members love it.
This spring my farm share has 16 members, I would call this a small CSA as the larger CSA farms have memberships in the hundreds and few have thousands of members. I do not want to get that big. Ideally I would have around 50 to 75 members which would mean I could quit doing farmers markets, but I love doing farmers markets so I would probably still go even though the CSA would be large enough to keep the farm afloat financially.
Only once did I get almost to the goal of 50 member. That was during the beginning of the Covid lockdowns in the spring of 2020 when the food supply chains were getting disrupted and people started panicking. That year I went from 3 CSA members and the very real prospect shutting down the farm share in February. This was before C19 had a name and things were still open and I figured we would depend on farmers markets for our main income. In March everything changed, the farmers market I do was closed until further notice (we do a winter FM). We had to figure out how to sell all the produce we were producing so I quickly set up an ordering system and people would order food and come to the farm and pick it up remotely. I was considering going with this system when in April about 3 weeks into the C19 shutdown I suddenly went from 3 members to over 45 members and the 2020 farm season was saved. It was a good growing season and I thought that maybe my CSA after 20 some years was going to be really successful. that we would retain most of these members for years. We did not, By 2022 we were down to around 25 members, 2023 that number went down and again last year it did the same thing. We did get 10 members from the covid scare that have stuck with us ever since and will likely be with us until either we get out of farming (I will probably do this until I die) or they die or move.
