Lexicon of Food

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CSA

"The CSA is direct marketing at its most eloquent. Consumers not only buy right from the farmer, but actually invest their money, and part of themselves, in the transaction. It's their farm now. Their farmer. Their reconnection." - Douglas Gayeton

As spring is upon us, we focus this week’s Food List on the budding CSA season and ways in which communities can support their local farmers.

Weather, pests, and disease are some of the risks that farmers face each year. Our friends at Sustainable Food Trust share with us frameworks for farming together as a solution to maintaining local agricultural solidarity.

Community support is fundamental to small scale farmers. CSA explores the ways in which community supported agriculture shares risks and benefits between farmers and their subscribers.

The CSA model has proven to be an alternative approach to the supermarket model, not just for buying produce, but for seafood too. Just Food’s shares with us a farm-to-office spin on community supported agriculture.

The model of CSA extends beyond the farm, and resonates within the community. As Judith Schwartz reminds us, buying local boosts your local economy. One of our team members shares with us her story of strengthening local connections and resilience through the CSA model.

We wrap up this edition of the Food List with one farmer’s vision of the future for local food systems. And to inspire eager CSA members, GRACE shares with us a delicious spring recipe.Check out our contest to submit your own seasonally inspired recipe!

Now that we have planted the seed for community supported models, it’s your job to nourish the idea and keep it alive.

This week's terms

Collaborative Consumption

We’re seeing an economy that’s now a sharing economy. Everybody is becoming not just a consumer but also an active participant. It’s collaborative consumption. Instead of going to a hotel, you can rent somebody’s house. We’re going to see the same thing happen with our food system. You can be both a consumer and an active participant in helping sell local food to your neighbors. That will enable the movement to scale. - Benzi Ronen

Community Supported Agriculture

Buying a CSA membership means entering into a partnership with a local farm. The member buys a subscription at the beginning of the season. This cash infusion allows the farmer to pay for seed, water, equipment and labor early in the season when farm expenses are high and farm income is low. In return, the farm provides its members with a box of fresh picked seasonal produce each week. CSAs build community by reconnecting its members to the seasons and by fostering relationships between members and the people who grow their food.

Community Supported Fishery

Community Supported Fisheries (CSF) allow consumers to directly support small fishing operations. Subscribers get scheduled deliveries of fresh fish, with the contents varying each week, depending on what’s available. Fishermen, on the other hand, get a better price on small batches plus added stability when the market fluctuates. This symbiosis encourages fishermen to use sustainable methods while educating both fishermen and the community about issues in marine conservation.

Eating in Season

"Food is sensual and spiritual. It connects us with the land, the community, our bodies, the seasonal rhythms and the planet. Eating foods in season offers us a visceral connection to where we are now.

In a world where we can buy just about any produce, year round, it may seem innocent to be thrilled when the first ripe local peaches appear, or the morels or apple cider in the autumn. Yet these things ground us in place and time and help us mark the passing of one phase and celebrate the arrival of a new season." - Toseland Canon, Ethical Foods

Frameworks for Farming Together

Frameworks for Farming Together

Frameworks for Farming Together

As we experience a shift in our approach to food and farming, unconventional business models are becoming popular to allow for greater resource, skill, and knowledge pooling. Ellie Athanasis writes, “one way to create a stronger business model is by joining with others to form a cooperative.” Referring to Faith Gilbert’s Cooperative Farming guidebook, Athanasis agrees with Gilbert in that “by working together, we get more than just a solution to a problem: we get solidarity.” From business models to handling internal disputes, Gilbert and the Greenhorns help to outline cooperative farming as an alternative mode of operation.

Read more about Cooperative Farming in the link below!

Read more at sustainablefoodtrust.org

Community Supported Agriculture

Community Supported Agriculture

CSA=Community Supported Agriculture

Community Supported Agriculture

What if you could buy fresh fruit and vegetables each week, grown by a local farmer? Anne Cure of Cure Organic Farm in Boulder, Colorado explains how CSAs, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, allow consumers to purchase subscriptions from local farmers, and in return, receive weekly boxes of fresh produce while getting to know the people who grow their food.

Farm-To-Office: CSA Taps Alternative Market

Farm-To-Office: CSA Taps Alternative Market

Farm-To-Office: CSA Taps Alternative Market

Feeling limited by the short growing season and and their small pool of customers, a farming couple in the Adirondacks put a twist on the CSA model: they set up workplace deliveries. Seeing this as an opportunity to reach out to customers who otherwise would not join a CSA, the Hainers experienced a positive response. Paula Lukats of Just Food recognized the potential for this atypical CSA model and soon began introducing workplace CSAs to the urban landscape of NYC. Workplace CSA’s add diversity to the work week and introduce the farmer to urban CSA members. While the introduction of a new model comes with it’s own complexities and obstacles, there has been a resounding affirmation that CSAs in the workplace are bringing the essence of farms to people, thereby widening the impact of local producers

Learn more about alternative markets for CSA here!

Read more at justfood.org

Community Supported Fishery

Community Supported Fishery

Photo by Douglas Gayeton

Community Supported Fishery

Location: Siren Sea SA, at Mission PIE pick-up location, San Francisco, CA

Featuring: Anna Larsen, founder of Siren Fish Co. 

A community supported fishery, a CSF, allows consumers to directly supports small fishing operations. Subscribers get scheduled deliveries of fresh fish — the contents vary each week, depending on what’s available, while fishermen get a better price on small batches and added stability when the market fluctuates. This symbiosis encourages fishermen to use sustainable methods while educating both fishermen and the community about issues in marine conservation.

Anna says a CSF is immune to the two greatest challenges facing the fishing industry: fraud and lack of accountability. Lack of transparency in supply chains and multiple trade names or single species make it very easy to market “trawl fish” as “hook and line,” or fish from a dirty farm as “wild caught.” On the contrary, in the CSF there is no middle man and, therefore, no room for misinformation to spread. When you see the Fish and Game tab and then inspect the fish straight from the dock, you know exactly what you are getting. Nothing beats from the sea to you.

Buy Local, Boost the Economy!

Buy Local, Boost the Economy!

Buy Local, Boost the Economy!

In this article, Judith Schwartz begins unpacking the phrase "Buy Local" that has recently taken the country by storm and has encouraged buy local campaigns across nearly every state. She explains the impact these campaigns can have on local economies, the higher cost of local goods, community resiliency, and local currency. She says, the point is not for communities to become completely self-sufficient, but to identify markets they can supply through local manufacturing and services.

Read more at content.time.com

Growing Community Supported Agriculture: Resiliency and Interdependencies

Growing Community Supported Agriculture: Resiliency and Interdependencies

Growing Community Supported Agriculture: Resiliency and Interdependencies

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is defined by its role in cultivating local connections, healthy farms, and a healthy local food system.

Melissa Terry lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas on a 9 acre solar powered, natural hay farm with her family. Like most farmers, she and her husband, Flint Richter, have off-farm jobs. Melissa is a graduate student studying food policy at the University of Arkansas, an intern with the US EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge, and a garden/nutrition club coordinator at her two daughters’ public elementary school. Melissa is part of the Lexicon team as a Pop-Up Show Curator. Read her thoughts on a CSA below:

Our urban farm is actively engaged in community supported agriculture; we grow natural hay for one of our NW Arkansas regional CSA suppliers, Summer Kitchen Farms, in exchange for a full season CSA subscription. For a small farm operation, this type of arrangement is essential and allows for greater flexibility in home/farm economic prioritizing. Our farms are 10 miles apart so this arrangement makes it simple for us to provide Summer Kitchen with a healthy, chemical free resource they use to feed their animals and mulch their gardens. This micro-cycle comes back to us as a barter in the form of a weekly basket full of healthy, chemical free produce, flowers, herbs, and locally-processed beef, pork, and chicken.

Bartering is not a new concept. This kind of produce trading model is the currency that helps keep operational costs down for small-scale farms, while also compensating for gaps in the spaces for local supply chain resources. Bartering resources is an age-old practice and a great way to build strong connections with your farming neighbors.

Our regional farming community is like many others — growing but also struggling with the lack of regional agricultural supply chains. Aggregation and distribution is a challenge. Local economic models inspired by community supported agriculture and the age old bartering system have allowed for our agriculture community to build interdependencies and resilience.

Connecting People with Farms

Connecting People with Farms

Connecting People with Farms

An Interview with Anne Cure

Anne Cure is the farmer and co-owner of Cure Organic Farm, a farm she and her husband, Paul, started in 2005. Anne & Paul live on the farm with their daughters, Georgia and Lauren. Anne is active in working to keep agricultural land in the hands of farmers, and is passionate about bringing more young farmers into the fields. She believes that community involvement is crucial in the revival of small family farms. Anne is dedicated to using sustainable methods that help to maintain a healthy farm ecosystem, and is always introducing new crops as well as animals into the mix.

Communities are becoming more and more involved in their local food system through community supported agriculture (CSA). Anne Cure explains the mechanisms of her CSA and shares her visions of the future.

Douglas Gayeton: Can you please tell us a little bit about your farm?

Anne Cure: [At Cure Organic Farm], we grow 12 acres of certified organic vegetables and flowers. We have additional grazing pasture where we raise Berkshire pork, Rambouillet sheep for wool and for meat, chickens for eggs and meat, and we have an apiary of about 15 hives.

All the food that we grow is distributed within about 50 miles through our community supported agriculture (CSA) program. We also sell at an on-site farm stand, we participate in the Boulder Farmers’ Market twice a week and we have about a dozen restaurants that we sell to throughout the year.

Douglas Gayeton: How would you define a CSA?

Anne Cure: A CSA is where people in the local community come out and develop a relationship with the land and the people that are growing their food. They participate by eating seasonally, eating locally. Whatever is coming out of the field is what they take home for their families. It’s about keeping the local economy strong; it’s about keeping agriculture as a focus in our communities; it’s about developing a relationship with the land and the people who grow our food.

Douglas Gayeton: With most CSAs you pay a set amount of money and then you get a box every week, but can you explain how your CSA is a little different?

Anne Cure: Our CSA is a little different in that our CSA members share the risks in the bounty of the farm. When we have a great season they’ve got extra green beans to put in their freezer. When we have a light season or our crop gets frosted out, members shared that risk with us as well, and we don’t have as many tomatoes to share that year.

We try to foster a relationship between CSA members and the land of teh farm where CSA members come. They read off of a chalkboard how much of each item is in their share. THey pack their own produce out from the farm.

There’s also an exchange table. if there is something they don’t care for that week, they can trade it out for something else. Having people here on the land is really important for people to actually see where the food is coming from.

Douglas Gayeton: What do you envision the maturing local food system looking like in five years?

Anne Cure: I think we are on the way to more people having some understanding of how food gets to their place, whether they’re buying it in a grocery store, at a farmers’ market, or at a restaurant.

All across the nation small farms are popping up. Younger people are getting excited about farming again. Many farms offer work opportunities to learn the skills and the business part of small farming.

My vision is that there’s going to be small farms that pop up which provide a connection for our consumers to know where their food comes from and how it gets to their plate, and continue to teach the next generation of farmers how to grow wonderful food and take care of the ecosystem at the same time.

Recipe: Fava & Pecorino Crostini With Mint and Pea Shoots

Recipe: Fava & Pecorino Crostini With Mint and Pea Shoots

Recipe: Fava & Pecorino Crostini With Mint and Pea Shoots

Fava bean season is almost upon us! You may find fava beans in your CSA box from spring until early summer. For those unfamiliar with fava beans, also known as broad beans, they are often grown as cover crops, because they are cold hardy and, as a legume, fix nitrogen in the soil. Did you know fava bean shoots are also edible and delicious? Find below a great recipe for these delicious beans.

Find out more recipes for the future season!

Read more at sustainabletable.org

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