CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) Continue to Expand: Consumers Partner with Local Farmers

Cutting Out the Middlemen, Shoppers Buy Slices of Farms

by Susan Saulny
New York Times
Thursday, July 10, 2008

This recent article in the New York Times confirms the skyrocking popularity of Community Supported Agriculture or CSAs. We expect the number of CSAs to grow exponentially over the next few years and encourage everyone to look into partnering with a local farm. A good source of information is the Eat Well Guide and Local Harvest websites. You can search by zip codes for local farms.

“In an environmentally conscious tweak on the typical way of getting food to the table, growing numbers of people are skipping out on grocery stores and even farmers markets and instead going right to the source by buying shares of farms…The concept was imported from Europe and Asia in the 1980s as an alternative marketing and financing arrangement to help combat the often prohibitive costs of small-scale farming. But until recently, it was slow to take root. There were fewer than 100 such farms in the early 1990s, but in the last several years the numbers have grown to close to 1,500, according to academic experts who have followed the trend.”