Interest in 'community supported agriculture' grows

ASSUMPTION — A Christian County farm best known for corn and soybeans — including marketing ties to Brazil — has added a backyard garden.

August Creek Farm joins the growing list of "community supported agriculture" operations across Illinois targeted to consumer demand for locally grown produce. The concept — consumers buy memberships, and the CSAs plant, tend and harvest the crops — has been around for more than a quarter century.

The popularity of the local and organic food movement, according to CSA groups, has begun to attract larger, traditional farms to the niche market.

"I do all the work, and I bring the produce to them," said Andrea Corzine of August Creek Farm. "We try to pay them back dollar for dollar in vegetables.

"With the local food movement, they've become a lot more popular."

She said August Creek Farm, in many ways, grew out of the recession. After graduating from college in 2009 with a degree in natural resources and land management, Corzine bounced around in various part-time jobs in Florida before finding full-time work.

"It was an interesting period in my life," she said.

Read more here.

Beyond the CSA: Four Ways Communities Support Everything From Books to Beer

You know the model: Consumers purchase a share of the season’s harvest upfront and get a box of fresh produce each week from the farm. Now you can get your medicine that way too.

Since the first community supported agriculture program was established in western Massachusetts in the 1980s, the concept of buying food directly from local farms has taken off. There are now thousands of CSAs across the country. It’s a simple enough model—consumers purchase a share of the season’s harvest upfront, and they get a box or bag of fresh, locally grown produce each week from the farm.

And this model is not restricted to farming. In recent years, people have applied the CSA idea to other types of goods and services such as dining out, microbrews, and even fish. It’s a system that works for both producers and consumers. Here are some of our favorite examples.

Community supported breweries

According to the Brewers Association, there were nearly 1,500 microbreweries in the United States in 2013, a 23 percent increase over the 2012 count. As craft beer becomes ever more popular, some breweries have adopted the farm CSA model to offer customers exclusive access to their favorite local brews.

By purchasing a CSB share, you get to take home a specified quantity of beer at regular intervals, usually monthly. You are directly purchasing from the producer, thus creating a relationship between creator and consumer. CSB memberships typically offer six- or twelve-month options and include additional benefits like discounts and members-only events.

It’s a system that works well from a brewery’s perspective too. “For a small producer, you get money upfront that you need to buy ingredients and packaging, you know what people want ahead of time (in some instances), and they come and pick up the beer themselves,” explained Page Buchanan, owner of House of Brews in Madison, Wis., in an email. “So, it solves the challenges of knowing what to make, buying the raw materials to make it, and then distributing it to the end consumer. It’s very efficient.”

Read more: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/beyond-the-csa-four-ways-communities-support-everything-from-health-care-to-beer