If you’re a gambler, try this on for size: for a modest sum, you bet on Mother Nature. If she smiles at you, you get showered in fabulous fresh local food. If not, you get less food, or maybe none – but you still hold winning cards in a game that will pay out over time.
Actually, you don’t have to be a gambler to take this bet. All you really risk is how soon, and in what form, you see your payoff.
What I’m referring to is community-supported agriculture (CSA) – a fast-rising way of playing an investor-like role in your local food system, with benefits that work in a number of ways. Not least of which might be more sweet peaches than you could imagine, come August.
In December I wrote about the book Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch. Tasch argues that our systems of financial investment have become so complex and layered with intermediaries that we are dangerously detached from seeing the consequences of our investment choices.
Those consequences are serious – degradation of the planet through short-term thinking that does not assess long-term health or happiness as it blindly seeks the next quick return. Tasch encourages people to move back toward investment that uses head and heart, that builds local relationships and resilient local food systems.
However, in seeking ways to follow through on Tasch’s recommendations in our region, you run into a few bumps. There really aren’t any simple vehicles for investing directly in local food systems, especially if you’re a small investor.
I’m told there may be options coming – so stay tuned – but meanwhile, CSAs are one option that move you a good step closer to making meaning with your money, and can be fun (and delicious), too.
Also called “community shared agriculture,” CSAs operate by offering buyers a share of a farm’s produce for a set upfront price.
A couple hundred dollars might get you a basket of produce weekly throughout the growing season. This puts money in the farmers’ hands at the outset of the season when it is most needed – and launches you on a foodie adventure.
Basically, you share the farmer’s risk: you pay the same price whether you get a bumper crop or part of “your” farm gets sideswiped by a bad storm. And if melons don’t grow well but strawberries and squash are superb, well, you’ll experience what it’s like to really eat in tune with nature.
Many CSAs keep blogs and most communicate week by week what’s coming your way for lunch. So even if your green thumb … isn’t, you can also share in some awareness of what it takes to grow and harvest food.
“I’ve been working here 10 years and I’ve seen the whole CSA market explode,” said Bonita Magee of the non-profit Farm Folk City Folk in a recent interview. “The exciting thing is that they’re diversifying their product now. Instead of just signing up for a vegetable box, we have a honey CSA and grain CSAs, even a salmon CSA with a fisherman.”
There are CSAs all over the province – and even some in urban Vancouver, farming backyards and front lawns of willing homeowners.
Magee says she believes consumer demand is driving the trend, since it does take some work and effort for a farmer to set up a program and make it work. She also says she has never yet heard of a failure where the consumer was left with empty hands.
“Another reason to buy into a CSA is that you’re giving that farmer more money for his product than he would get by selling to a wholesaler,” said Magee. “You’re also reducing the amount of time he has to put in. If his customers are signed up and locked in before he plants a seed, then all he has to do is grow and distribute; he doesn’t have to focus on sales or marketing.” This helps improve hourly wages, which Magee says are about $10 per hour for most farmers.
For these reasons, Magee says CSAs are a way to invest in the future of your food. This is the long-term payoff I mentioned at the outset. This year’s CSA membership gives you a share of this year’s harvest.
Meanwhile, you’ve supported a farmer by sharing the risk and improving his or her return, making it more likely that the individual, and that piece of land, will continue to produce harvests into the future.
In a world where it’s conceivable that all the good farmland could get paved over before anyone comes to their senses (been north of Toronto lately?), it’s worth doing something to ensure your local food system stays that way – local, full of food and functioning like a system should.
Sharing a little risk here and there makes a lot more sense than putting all your money into the hands of growers and governments far away from where you live and eat. In this gamble, you win both ways.
To find a CSA near you, check the Farm Folk City Folk website at www.ffcf.bc.ca/resources/kp/csa.html.