Joining a Community Supported Agriculture program
While it may fit your lifestyle perfectly to visit your local farmers’ market each week, selecting your purchases from the various vendors you see that day (which is a fine option, to be sure!), perhaps you are interested in expanding your understanding of your food’s production. In that case, joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program can be a terrific choice: your advance payment to a farm buys you a share of the season’s harvest, and creates a relationship between you and the farm/farmer throughout the season.
Note: While there are CSA-type arrangements for a variety of farms and products (at Saratoga Farmers’ Market, for example, you can find various farms offering CSAs that include eggs, meat, flowers, fruit, bread, and vegetables), much of this post is written with vegetables in mind.
CSA programs have become increasingly popular in recent years, with several available in the greater Saratoga region. Almost always with a CSA relationship, you’ll expand your food horizons by receiving in your weekly “share” (sometimes pre-boxed, sometimes assembled by you at the farmers’ market or another distribution point) a vegetable or other farm product with which you aren’t well acquainted. You can stretch your food knowledge in this way, learning to prepare and eat foods that have not been everyday staples in your home.
In our family of four, we combine a CSA program with frequent trips to the farmers’ market to round out our farm-fresh foods, and that works well for us. CSA programs vary in the amount of products offered; some are scaled for one or two eaters while others are family-sized. It isn’t always the size of your household that matters, either, in determining the program best for you. Sometimes your rate of veggie consumption matters more.
Often, a farm offering a CSA program shares educational materials with its CSA customers about farm happenings, perhaps via an e-newsletter or blog. Recipes and preparation tips are sometimes part of the package. Occasionally, special farm tours or events invite CSA customers for a visit and let them put their hands in the dirt. (Some CSAs offer the option to work on the farm as partial payment.)
Another benefit of joining a CSA is that you will learn to eat seasonally. This also happens if you shop at a farmers’ market, but a CSA will really connect you with the rhythm of a given farm’s production.
What about the risks, you might ask, of investing up front and wondering if the farm will have a good year or not? That is certainly a consideration, but farms typically work to keep their CSA customers as happy as possible. The cash inflow generated through CSA memberships in the early part of the year is important to farms, as they help to cover the investments in seeds, soil enhancements, and machinery at the beginning of the growing season.
Learn More: At a Market, Online, or at a CSA Fair
There are several ways to discover local farms offering CSA arrangements, including talking to farmers at a winter farmers’ market or doing a web-based search. There are many farms that offer CSA arrangements in the local area. Some of the farms at Saratoga Farmers’ Market offer CSA buying programs with pick-up at the market or elsewhere; there are also farms that are not at the weekly market and distribute their products exclusively via CSA, perhaps with pick-up directly at the farm.
If you’d like to meet your future farmer in person, the Capital Region CSA Fair run by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York on March 23 might be of value to you. This gathering will have several CSA farms in attendance, so you can learn more about CSAs, meet your local area farmers, compare share options, and sign up for your 2013 farm share. The fair is free for consumers, and will take place on Saturday, March 23 from 1:00-3:00 p.m. at Clifton Park Halfmoon Public Library, located at 475 Moe Road, Clifton Park.
