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CSA Memberships Are 'Make Or Break' For Small Farmers

olde lane orchard apples

We still have at least a couple months before spring crops will be harvested; before summer farmers market really start bustling; before farmers start collecting on the crops they've grown.

But this is a busy -- and expensive -- time of year for growers. They have to buy seeds and soil amendments. They hire workers and improve their farms' infrastructure. To get an influx of money when they need it most, some farmers develop CSAs -- community supported agriculture programs.

The Promise Of Local Food

It's CSA day at the Bloomington Winter Farmers' Market. There are five vendors touting CSA programs. The basic facts are the same, table to table -- you pay a flat fee now, and you receive a weekly batch of freshly-harvested food for 18-25 weeks starting in May. The farmers talk about what they think sets their CSA apart from the competition.

"We offer both a standard and a flexible model for people who aren't always in town. We grow pretty much every vegetable you can imagine, and we have a big you-pick strawberry patch now, which will also feed into our CSA," says Michael Hicks of Living Roots Ecovillage.

"I specialize in European varieties, heirloom varieties," says Teresa Birtles of Heartland Family Farm. "I grow for flavor. Having chefs as customers, I have to have wonderful flavor.

"We are an organic farm. We're not certified organic. We grow a lot of greens, and a lot of times we have greens throughout the really hot, dry parts of summer. We have special techniques to grow them that most farms kind of give up on," says Jim Baughman of Freedom Valley Farm.

"And what you're doing is you're committing to focusing a good portion of your meat budget to one farm to ensure the survival of that farm, while getting the very best in terms of transparency, nutrient density and the quality of the meat," says Larry Howard, Maple Valley Farm.

Birtles' table is packed with melons, three colors of cauliflowers, beans, broccoli and berries. She admits she bought this food from the grocery store to illustrate the variety she offers throughout her CSA, but it seems to be causing as much confusion as excitement. "I've had some people who are not familiar with seasonality," she says. "So, they think, ‘Do I get strawberries with my winter squash,' or ‘Do I get tomatoes first thing in the spring?' So, the seasonality question has been a huge, huge question.

Sharing The Risk

It's romantic to fantasize about fresh-from-the-farm vegetables when you're still wearing a winter coat and scraping your car off in the mornings. But for a farmer, the CSA can be an important part of the bottom line.

It's make or break, it really is... What we're trying to do is ensure that this is something truly sustainable.

"It's make or break, it really is," says Howard, whose meat CSA includes beef, lamb, goat, chicken, turkey, eggs and pork. "I think everything with the small farms now, who are doing this, is make-or-break whether people realize it or not. We've been in this ten years, so we know what the numbers are. What we're trying to do is ensure that this is something truly sustainable."

He wants to be able to pass the farm along to his kids. Howard is hoping for 50 members. He breaks down where the money goes -- 40-percent to salaries, 40-percent to sourcing the animals, and the rest is for the risk management fund.

"What I fear the most probably, I have to be honest, is we have a bad growing year and we don't have much to put in there," says Baughman. "I'm not sure how well they would really accept that, and that's something I worry about."

He says CSA membership dictates what he plants at Freedom Valley Farm. He had 40 members last year, and he wants to nearly double that this season. That's despite a stressful 2015 on his farm.

"Last year, it got really bad. We had a lot of rain early on. We had a lot of onions and carrots rotting in the ground. We had full-year disease problems, so it was a struggle. And I was at one point thinking, we're going to have to refund people. But somehow we managed through it, and actually we were able to give them their amount every week."

My Food Budget

Kathy Curry is shopping around for CSAs today.

"It just sounds like a good thing to do. I've tried to raise my own gardens throughout the years and not had a lot of success," she says.

After two conversations with Hicks of Living Roots and Birtles of Heartland, "I'm ready to sign up, but I know that's not a wise thing to do. I'll think about that over the week."

She grabs flyers and takes one last look at the bounty on the Heartland table. She still has three more pitches to hear, and then she'll go home and see how a CSA fits into her food budget.

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