Community Supported Agriculture

I've mentioned Community Supported Agriculture a few times in the past couple of months and I thought I'd expand on the subject a little. Basically CSA's are cooperative ventures where you (the consumer) invest in a farm or collection of farms. In return for a fee paid at the beginning of the season you (still the consumer) get a portion of the farm's output. I suspect the concept is a bit of a hard sell in the Great Plain states, as most people are apparently not that interested in a few hundred bushels of hard winter wheat. In our case we are part of a CSA

The advantage of the CSA is that the consumer can get very fresh produce that hasn't been bred to look good after a week in a rail car. The disadvantage of the CSA is that you share the risk with the farmer. Or I should say - the farmer shares his risk with you. If there's a drought or early frost or hail storms or biblical end times, then your selection of produce might be drastically limited and your immortal soul might be in peril. For instance, some friends of ours invested in a CSA last year and they ended up with nothing but zucchini week after week. Such are the breaks. On the other hand, when it's a good year it can be pretty spectacular.

Our CSA cost us $465 for a half share. This means we get a box every week for 26 weeks. What's in the box is usually a surprise and is based upon what is ripe and available at the farm. So early in the year it's a lot of fast growing things like lettuce or green onions. Later in the year it's tomatoes, cauliflower and the like. What we've found is a half share is a lot of veggies for two people.

For example, last week's (early October) food box contained the following:

1 head of cauliflower

1 head of red leaf lettuce

2 zucchinis

2 yellow squash

4 ears of yellow corn

1 bunch of carrots

2 pounds of green beans

1 bunch of Tuscan kale

1 eggplant

1 bunch fresh dill

1 bunch flat leaf (Italian) parsley

1 bunch cilantro

For all that we paid the equivalent of around $18.

As an experiment I went and checked the prices of all these items at the local Safeway. Now all of the produce we receive from the CSA is organic. Around half of the items were also available at the grocery in organic varieties while half were not. The total for the regular grocery produce was $30.51. And that's conservative since organic produce is typically something like 20-30% more expensive then non-organic varieties.

So it is a nice savings. This is great for us since we love veggies. Someone whose idea of extra veggies is ordering the jumbo colossal order of fries from McWendy's will probably be a little unhappy. Even we, dedicated devourers of helpless plant life, had a few problems. Like the period of several weeks early in the summer when we routinely got up to four heads of lettuce in each delivery. I like salad but sheesh. On the other hand, I did discover that you actually can grill heads of romaine lettuce. Next up - battered and deep fried lettuce heads.

Besides the actual vegetables we also got quite a lot of herbs. More than any two people could eat by themselves. We ended up trying out a couple of things that also resulted in substantial savings for us. I used the fresh dill to make my own gravlax. My outlay for salmon, dill, salt and pepper came to approximately $7.50 a pound. The very cheapest prepackaged lox at the grocery was $16.76 per pound. That is a savings of around 56%. Earlier during the summer we also got a large amount of basil. This we used to make pesto which also freezes very well. Savings were similar to the gravlax. And finally, I replenished my stocks of several dried herbs by drying my own.

If the opportunity arises to get in on a CSA, I'd recommend that dedicated vegetable fans look into it. Mary found ours through the following site - LocalHarvest.org.