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Genesee Valley Organic Community Supported Agriculture |
Building the Community in CSA: Another World Is Possible by Elizabeth Henderson
"When our resources become scarce, we fight over them. In managing our resources and in sustainable development, we plant the seeds of peace." Wangari Maathai, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, 2004.
Greetings! Sorry I can't stay for entire conference; Sunday is our End of Season Dinner—special this year since we will be announcing our Preserving Peacework campaign to buy the 135 acre farm where we have been renting 18 acres.
This winter, I will be updating Sharing the Harvest: A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture for Chelsea Green. Please send me copies of your brochures, newsletters and any other materials and I will try to incorporate them into the new edition.
However you feel about the outcome of the recent presidential election, one thing emerges with stark clarity—neither major party represents the interests of family farmers on the small to medium scale. Republicans and Democrats alike stomp for Free Trade, which in agriculture has hastened the economic pressures against family farmers all over the world. If we are to do more than barely survive, we must build public support for our farming. At the recent Slow Food gathering for 5000 small scale farmers in Turin, Italy, Carlo Petrini, founder of the group, said:
"We must make a conscious, cultural choice to support a good quality of food that meets the needs of customers who appreciate the producers of their foods. Producers and consumers share a common fate. Protection of our food heritage is a common task. Customers must become co-producers and understand that when production is threatened, they are threatened."
What can we as farmers do to win customers to that understanding and turn more of them into our fervent allies?
At the NE CSA Conference in 1999, Marty Strange, co-founder of the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Nebraska, and author of Family Farming, pointed out that the special competitive advantage of CSA is sharing the risk with our members. In no other form of marketing do customers agree to share the risks (and benefits) with farmers. If crop yields are good, CSA members enjoy larger shares. If the season is a difficult one, members pay the same amount of money, but receive less food. The past couple of years, the federal Risk Management Agency has begun reforming the crop insurance they offer farms to accommodate the particular needs of smaller, more diversified operations. They now offer Agri-lite insurance based on the entire revenues of past seasons, rather than the yields of individual crops. But farmers still have to shell out for an insurance policy and we know who really benefits from that. In joining a CSA, our members make the conscious decision to insure our farms against the vicissitudes of the weather and the marketplace. Customers make a great leap of understanding when they agree to these terms with a farm.
My farm, Peacework, and the Genesee Valley Organic CSA actually have members sign a contract acknowledging these terms. At new member orientation, we explain what it means and, through our newsletter and occasional "Farm Flashes," we keep members informed about the conditions that increase or decrease the yields and quality of the crops that will go in their shares. At the same time, as farmers we do everything we can technically to assure a steady supply of food. We plant 25% more than we know we will need for the shares and grow 70 different crops. No matter what the weather, something is growing happily. The mix in our shares varies from year to year. Through our explanations and their visits to work at the farm, our members come to understand why and to appreciate the skill that fills their baskets despite unseasonable weather.
In that keynote, Marty Strange also warned that market pressures and the current convenience mentality will drive CSA towards cheap food and convenience or towards an expensive and elitist system. To avoid these alternatives and take CSA to the next generation, we need to think through very carefully what sharing the risk means and figure out how we can nurture this sharing. I believe it gives us an opportunity to begin transforming our local areas into nuclei of sustainable living.
When I try to picture a healthy, sustainable community, I see people taking responsibility for the most important elements of their lives—food, reproduction, work, education, transportation. They cooperate with one another and practice neighborliness—Wendell Berry writes about this so eloquently. Through the way we organize our CSAs, we can take people on the first steps toward this vision. We can't just offer service—we have to activate our members.
There are as many ways to activate and involve members as there are CSAs. Jen and John Bokaer-Smith at Westhaven Farm at the Eco-Village in Ithaca, New York, recruit working shares. Members get a reduction in the share price in exchange for eight consecutive weeks of harvesting providing the farm with a fairly skilled team of harvesters. The Porter Farm in Elba, New York, asks members to provide drop-off points for as many as 20 shares. In New York City, Just Food organizes core groups to help farms connect with groups of city consumers, set up distribution sites, and coordinate the receiving end of the CSAs. Each farm has to find the level of member involvement that is acceptable to members and comfortable for the farmer—but maybe not too comfortable. We should consider pushing beyond our comfort zone to try some new ideas and learn some new skills.
The GVOCSA and Peacework have asked a lot of our members since we started CSA 16 years ago. Every member either does three 4-hour shifts of farm work and 2-2½ hours of distribution work, or becomes a member of the core group. Many of you have probably heard me talk about this before, but I will try to dig deeper this time.
To join us in the farm work, most members drive an hour, arriving at 8 am, work till noon, then drive back to the city with boxes of vegetables which they unload at our distribution site, the Abundance Cooperative Market, and store in a cooler we built in the co-op's warehouse area. The previous week, these members pick up empty boxes to bring to the farm when they come to work. We have detailed instructions on our website and in a Member Guide book on how to prepare themselves for the farm work—gloves, boots, insect repellent, snacks for children, etc. In the Member Guide, provided to each member, we have tried to detail everything they need to know to be active members in the GVOCSA. As members arrive at the farm, they join the farm crew in harvesting greens—we start an hour or even 2 earlier, especially on hot summer days. One of us explains to them exactly what to do: take a knife, take some rubber bands, cut arugula one-half inch above the ground, collect a bunch that is the circumference of a silver dollar, sort through the bunch and pull out any yellowed leaves, weeds, etc., place a rubber band around stems, 2 turns. I force myself to stop my own work and watch as members make their first bunches, joking that I am "snoopervising."
When we see that everyone the printed schedule leads us to expect that morning has come, we stop work for a few moments and perform our greeting ritual—we explain our plans for the morning, talk a little about the latest weather or relevant events, go around the circle introducing ourselves, remind people where the toilet is, ask who is staying to lunch, and then divide into several groups to continue work. We ask if there is anyone with any sort of health problem that would affect the kind of work they can do. We can always find a sit down job for the aching or a stand up wash job for the pregnant. Some people do harvesting, others wash and pack. A farmer or an intern works with them. When harvesting is completed, those who are not washing and packing work with a farmer on the most pressing job—weeding carrots (we hand weeded 1½ miles of carrots this year), planting garlic, mulching, etc. Many of these jobs are suitable and attractive to children. Over 100 come to the farm each year with their parents. While working, we make a point to have intense conversations with our helpers. We get to know many of our members well. Long lasting friendships develop. At least 100 of the families have been with us over 10 years. We know their children, their relatives and they know us.
Distribution is done entirely by members. On each distribution day, there is a coordinator who is also a member of the CSA core group. Five to six other members help the coordinator weigh and set out the food for other members to pick up. Along with the vegetables, the farm sends a list of what to put in the shares. We offer two sizes— full and partial, and for each size, there is also a macrobiotic variant. Each week, members have the option of ordering additional vegetables from a bulk list. To add to the complexity, the core includes a Special Order coordinator who arranges for purchases of items we do not produce at Peacework— strawberries, blueberries, grape juice, wine, and maple syrup. Members sign up and pay for these orders in advance, and all of this is distributed during the pick up sessions. Our neighbors, Deb and Rick Austin of Heidenreich Farms, deliver eggs and chicken to members who have preordered. There is a regular swarm of mercantile and social activity. Abundance Co-op benefits from the convergence of over 100 families twice a week at the store. Even the produce section does well— CSA members purchase fruit or extra vegetable ingredients. The coop regularly has its biggest sale volume on GVOCSA days.
Critical to attendance at both the farm and distribution is the reminder phone call or email. Three members who suffer from disabilities provide that service as their contribution to the project.
(Slides of farm work and distribution)
According to "CSA Across the Nation," the results of the 1999 survey completed by 368 CSAs, only 28% have core groups. For many farmers, organizing a core group definitely pushes beyond the comfort zone of acquired farming skills. (How many of you have core groups to work with? About 1/3 of the people in the audience raised their hands.) I guarantee that if not the farmer, there are people in every community with the skills to put a core group together. I cannot emphasize enough how much our core group has meant to Peacework. For some CSAs, the core group is advisory. The GVOCSA core performs the administrative functions for the project and makes basic decisions. Each member has a specific job with clear responsibilities: distribution, newsletter, scheduling, outreach, website, special orders, winter shares, social events and book keeping. There are at least two people trained for each job so that no one suffers burnout. When a job gets too big, we divide it. As a whole, the core makes decisions, together with the farmers. We meet once a month throughout the year: the usual attendance is a dozen. In January, we have our biggest meeting—we review the annual farm budget. The farm sends two or more budget proposals to the core members in advance of this meeting where we discuss them and vote for the preferred version. With this budget as our basis, we set the number of shares and the share price for the year. Once the core agrees on the share numbers, they feel obliged to help recruit enough members to cover the budget.
Running an organization in this way requires good meeting skills. We have benefited from my 40 years or so experience on assorted committees and non-profit boards. Our core has attracted members with a variety of backgrounds—people who bring experience from working for peace and the environment, from running small businesses, church committees—Quakers, Mennonites, Catholics, Jews and assorted Protestants, and corporate jobs. They volunteer to be on the core because of their commitment to the food and the farm. They tell me they enjoy working on something positive; building, instead of protesting. There is a great esprit de corps within the group. Since we meet in the city, we farmers often leave first to drive the hour back to our homes. As I leave, I often notice the other core members clustered in intense conversations with one another—sometimes core business, more often socializing among friends.
Each year, different people step forward to do extra work. We try to note this and honor them at the annual End of the Season dinner. Special core committees have helped us find the farmland we have been renting, organize our move from our previous farm, locate new distribution sites when we outgrew the previous ones, and this year, figure out how to purchase the farm. During the year of our move, Marianne Simmons took on the huge job of coordinating purchases of food each week from 4 other farms. This year, Suzanne Wheatcraft has served as liaison between the Genesee Land Trust and the CSA. She serves both on our core and on the land trust board. Without the many hours she has spent researching and explaining, I doubt that the land trust would have decided to undertake a new departure by buying the 135 acres of the farm and leasing it back to Peacework. Her husband Andy heads up the land trust development committee, which will raise the $150,000 to buy the farm.
I realize our experience is particular to where we are and who we are. My farm partners and I come from non-farm backgrounds and started farming after other careers. I had the money for our initial investments from a car accident—really, not a very large sum - $35,000. The three of us are frugal northeasterners. We share similar values; we model "simple" living for our urban CSA members. Most significant, I think, is our commitment to group process—to struggling through whatever it takes to work together (we had counseling this year with a FarmNet trained social worker and it was a great help!) and to work with other people in our community to build a new blend of farm business-community organization that will last into the foreseeable future.
For all too many farmers, selling their farmland represents the best hope of financing retirement. Greg, Ammie and I are committed to a different path. We want to make our farm business to be affordable for younger partners and solid enough financially that we can provide living wages, full benefits and retirement to the farmers without selling the land. The decision to partner in stewardship with the Genesee Land Trust follows from our commitment to a long-term vision of social justice and environmental responsibility. By GLT owning the land, we will not have to take on the financial burden of a mortgage. The total investment in the farm will be smaller, allowing someone like Katie Lavin, who came to us last year as an intern and wants to farm, but does not have a lot of money, to become a full partner through sweat equity over only a few years. We will lease the land from the GLT at a fair market value that will cover the taxes, but fit in the farm's annual budget. We will own and maintain all farm buildings so that the land trust will be able to monitor the land use, but will not be burdened by farm maintenance. I feel confident that the social capital we have accumulated with our members and others in this geographical area will enable us to raise the money to buy the farm. We began fundraising last week and members have already pledged $53,000. Member involvement in our CSA is a critical piece of the equation.
I would like to broaden our focus for a few minutes to other ways we can build on sharing risks and responsibilities with our members. Since 1989, I have represented NOFA on the national scene in negotiations about the definition and the structuring of organic guarantees. At a DC sustainable ag conference organized by Roger Blobaum the previous year, a group of organic activists decided to convene a national meeting of organic farming associations. We met in Leavenworth, Kansas, where we launched the Organic Farmers Associations Caucus, OFAC. There were representatives from CCOF, MOFGA, OOGA, the NOFAs, Washington and Oregon Tilth, and others. Together, we represented a large proportion of the organic farmers in the country at that time. We discovered that our decentralized and disparate organic programs were over 90% in harmony with one another. The differences among them were largely procedural. Where we disagreed in substance, it was in areas where we lacked solid information, such as how many years it takes to convert a piece of land to organic management.
Kathleen Merrigan, staff person for Senator Leahy, came to the gathering to tell us about the first draft of what became the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA), the legislation that established the National Organic Program (NOP). At first glimpse, it was apparent to me that a centralized USDA-run program of the kind she proposed would make survival difficult for small farms and small organic certifiers. Certification programs would have to professionalize and charge more for their services and government accreditation would raise the price even further. Between 1990 and 1997, the Northeast Interstate Organic Certification Committee (the NOFAs, MOFGA, and Demeter) repeatedly urged the writers of the regs for the NOP to consider a round-robin system of accreditation, similar to that used by universities, to make accreditation less expensive. My mission on behalf of the NOFAs became trying to prevent the NOP from wiping us out. In that capacity, after OFAC disintegrated due to lack of resources, I have served as co-chair with Michael Sligh of RAFI of the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture Organic Committee (NCSA).
Since 1990, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have urged the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, IFOAM, to consider alternatives to the certification/accreditation model that would be more affordable for small scale farms. The IFOAM accreditation system has successfully won recognition from governments, and organic certification programs have facilitated the development of international trade, organic manufacturing and supermarket sales. But this system suffers from procedural overkill and is beyond the pocket of small-scale farms. An alternative system does not mean weaker standards, only simpler procedures that are more appropriate for farms that sell most of their production in local markets. Other voices from around the world - the Japanese Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA), supporter of Teikei in Japan, Movimiento Agroecologico de Latina America e el Caribe (MAELA), The Institute for Integrated Rural Development in India - were making the same points. Pipo Lernoud, Vice President of IFOAM finally responded by organizing a meeting in Brazil to bring together people from around the world who have been venturing into alternative forms of certification. In his opening address, Pipo told us that he had expected resistance from IFOAM's certification institutions. He was surprised to find them open to alternatives; they realize that half of the planet—a great majority of the people doing organic farming around the world—are not in their system. Pipo's goal for the Brazil meeting was not to destroy, but to create an opening to this other half of the world and return to the spirit of the original organic movement.
Forty people from 20 countries gathered at the Centro Ecologico near Torres, in southern Brazil, last April to exchange experiences and explore how to fit participatory certification into the existing system of organic guarantees. I was invited on two counts—because of NOFA-NY's Farmers Pledge and because of CSA. The other North American who attended was Ron Khosla, founder of Certified Naturally Grown. We were all able to read one another's stories in a preparatory booklet. At the meeting, facilitators summarized our reports and created an elaborate computer graph. The proceedings of the meeting are available on the IFOAM website: www.ifoam.org.
There are some inspiring projects in vastly different corners of the world. In New Zealand, with government support, Organic Farm New Zealand has created a system for the 2000 or so smallest holders, farms of 1 to 5 acres who mainly sell direct. The farmers are clustered into groups of 6 to 8. As a group, they inspect all the farms and fill out a written report, which they send to a regional office. If a problem arises, a representative from the regional office can visit and intervene. In Uganda, the National Organic Agriculture Movement of Uganda (NOGAMU) has organized 25,000 small farms into a marketing network. When a farmer joins NOGAMU, the local marketing officer visits the farm. If it meets basic organic standards, the farm can sell its products at an organic retail market. Since 1992, the Institute for Integrated Rural Development in Aurangabad, Maharashtra State, India, has set up a series of organic bazaars. Forty five eco-volunteers, women who have had 3 years of training and live in the villages, visit each farm once a month, providing advice and oversight.
I was especially impressed with Eco-Vida, the network of farms, small-scale processors, food coops, farmers markets and organic agronomists, which we visited in the Torres-Porto Allegre region of Brazil. Their model seems most applicable to my situation in west-central New York and you may find adaptable to your areas too. In my region, we already have a network of organic farmers, five CSAs around Rochester, a food coop that has a purchasing policy of buying local organic first, and a few extension agents who are getting interested in organic agriculture. The Eco-Vida system combines an organic guarantee that has won local and then national respect, with marketing, farmer education and farmer empowerment. Instead of an inspection, a group, including other farmers, a trained ag professional and some consumers visits each farm to have a conversation about all the interrelated issues the farmer faces. A regional nucleus has an ethics committee that deals with problems and violations of standards.
In Porto Allegre, a city of 1½ million, we toured two Eco-Vida sponsored farmers markets where over 400 farms sell their products. The organic movement in Brazil is in the process of legislating a national organic law that will recognize three forms of organic guarantee:
In the 25 years I have been active in the organic movement, I have witnessed impressive growth and the development of legitimacy, but also a distressing carving up of our mission into specialized areas. When we started the NOFAs 30 years ago, marketing, education for farm improvement, and a social agenda for rural development were intertwined in our activities and thinking. Initially, our certification programs combined crop improvement with inspection, more like the Eco-Vida visits with less regulation and more education. We never tried to codify our social agenda; core organic customers assumed that they were supporting small-scale independent family farms where people lived out right livelihoods that dignified physical labor. The advent of the NOP drove a wall between certification and farmer education. Core organic customers, like the members of the Abundance Coop, have been shocked to discover that some of the small organic businesses they had trusted have been swallowed up by the largest conventional food conglomerates. You can read about this in Michael Sligh's "Who Owns Organic?" on the RAFI website—rafiusa.org.
It is not too late for us to take action to reaffirm the values of the organic movement and to resist "those who would turn it into a pile of money," as Marty Strange put it. Michael Sligh, Richard Mandelbaum, Oscar Mendieta, and I have drafted Social Stewardship Standards to capture in the most concrete terms the meaning of social justice in our agriculture: fair pricing for farm products, living wages, dignified and safe working conditions for everyone in the organic food chain. (You can also find these standards on the RAFI website.) Florida Organic Growers will be certifying a few farms to these standards as a pilot project. In the Twin Cities region, the Domestic Fair Trade Project is already using them in trading among farms, processors and food coops. Everyone is free to use ideas from these standards in local trading.
Out of our discontent with the NOP and the tiresome task of watchdogging its repeated forays against organic integrity, the NCSA Organic Committee has come up with a proposal to create a National Organic Action Plan. Over the next few months, we will be encouraging every organic group and conference in the country to participate in discussions of this plan.
I hope to see local participatory organic guarantee projects springing up like mushrooms after a rainfall. In the National Organic Action Plan, we can make the demand that the OFPA be amended so that our local guarantees do not have to find a new label—ornery, or authentic or beyond organic. Like Certified Naturally Grown, we can take the national standards as our basis, adopt the fifty or so National Organic Standards Board recommendations that the NOP has ignored, use the Organic Certifiers Association interpretation of the "gray" areas, and incorporate Social Stewardship standards as well. As to procedures, each locality is free to create its own. In some areas, the farm visits might include only farmers. In others, there may be too few farmers, so groups of customers might do the visits. Each locality would also be free to run its own campaigns: some might want to emphasize food access, others might focus on renewable energy. With a participatory organic guarantee, we can proudly call our farm products Just Plain Local Organic.
By sharing the risks and responsibilities with our CSA members, our farms become training centers for sustainable living. We create the relationships of trust that are the firmest basis for any organic guarantee. We can rekindle the faith that food that is organically produced can also be fairly traded and the product of just working conditions. Each CSA is living proof of this belief.