By Anais Wheeler, Wcities Boston Contributor
In the spring of 2008, I joined together with a few friends, scrabbled together 500 hard-earned American dollars and bought six months worth of produce. We weren’t stocking up for potential food shortages or readying ourselves for the revolution—we had invested in a farm share. A farm share is a bulk purchase from a farm that participates in Community Supported Agriculture. Generally, the purchaser of a farm share (sometimes just called a “CSA”) receives a weekly batch of produce or other farm products in exchange for a lump sum at the beginning of the farm’s growing season.
The idea behind the CSA is a mutually beneficial relationship: the patron is a member of a community that is benefiting from the farm being in his or her community, so that patron agrees to invest in the farm and share in the risks intrinsic in each growing season. If the growing season is a poor one, the patron receives less for his or her investment; if the growing season is strong, then the farm can provide more farm-fresh goodness in exchange for that initial lump sum. The advantage of the CSA to the farm is clear: it receives money for produce that may not even be planted yet, and is able to plan its budget based on this up-front income. But what are the advantages to the purchaser of a farm share? What are the disadvantages? Looking back at our “investment” this season, we reflected on just these questions.
First, the cons. Accustomed to wandering through grocery aisles with shelves bulging with diverse and out-of-season offerings, none of us were used to centering our eating habits on what was currently ripe. We encountered all kinds of new queries. How can we manage to eat five pounds of cabbage in one week?[1] What is that mystery vegetable that smells like celery and looks like a shrunken head?[2] What do we do with just three small units (Heads? Sprigs?) of baby bok choy?
Most of the time, I enjoyed being forced into some sort of mindfulness regarding my eating habits. However, in August we started to receive pounds and pounds of root vegetables: beets, turnips, potatoes, onions, carrots and more beets. At the same time, Boston was chortling with glee as it pumped the temperature up to outlandish heights. Ninety degrees? In a city better known for the epic depths of its sidewalk slush? My apartment during this period was unbearable, with its flat asphalt roof and lack of a cross breeze. Still, we had root vegetables piling up on the counters, so we were forced to turn on the oven, cranking the apartment’s temperature up to something roughly equivalent to that of the fourth circle of hell. This was not a point at which I was feeling warm and fuzzy toward the farm share. In fact, if I saw another locally-grown parsnip, why I…
The inconvenience of the calendar was my main complaint about our CSA. It turns out that, in New England, most vegetables ripen in the summer (who knew?), so the bulk of the total produce we received came during these stifling months. This would be great if we had access to a root cellar in which to store potatoes until November, but shockingly, my third-floor walk-up doesn’t have this basic convenience, so the arrangement made for some heavy eating during the hot months.
Another participant in our CSA was distressed by the distance of our farm from Boston. In Boston, most CSA farms are outside the 495 belt around the city; our farm (Red Fire Farm) is 71.4 miles from my apartment. To me, used to eating bananas from Honduras and potatoes from Idaho, 71.4 miles is practically my living room, but it’s true that it’s a bit out of the way to be considered my “community.” Still, if the goal is preserving agricultural land in the vicinity of that great eastern belt, Megalopolis, I would argue that a farm in Granby, MA, is the right idea.
The pros, however, have me convinced to repeat the experience in 2009. The farm share encourages the idea of community in more ways than one. We found ourselves asking each other over to “Farm Share Dinner” each week instead of simply getting together to divvy up the goods. Sometimes we had too much of some vegetable or another to do away with it ourselves and were forced to invite non-farm sharers over to help consume it. The boyfriend and I talked farm share with acquaintances who had their own, and planned dinner parties around it. We introduced friends to purple potatoes and sold them on garlic flowers. The farm share made me think about what I was eating, a welcome change.
Finally, in terms of sheer cost-effectiveness, the farm share is a great investment. For the amount of fresh produce we received, our $125 per person contribution was a pittance—well worth it in terms of simple poundage and quality to cost. We received weekly shares from June to October, and bi-weekly shares until December. The produce augmented our grocery shopping and encouraged us to cook from scratch more than we normally would, ultimately saving us money.
For our CSA, we picked up at the local co-op where we already sometimes shopped; many farms that provide shares to Bostonians have drops at local health food stores, while others provide delivery services. We used Red Fire Farm, which has drop locations in Jamaica Plain and Cambridge. They offer produce shares, flower shares and fruit shares. The price of the share is based on a sliding scale. Parker Farms drops off in several Cambridge and Somerville locations. They offer meat and egg shares in addition to the standard produce share. There are many online locations to learn more about CSAs—start with a Google search, and go from there. This forum on Chowhound mentions several farms offering CSAs.
If you aren’t so into the cooking at home aspects of the farm share, there are tons of local restaurants using these same growers to provide them with local, sometimes organic, produce. One excellent option (if you can get a reservation) is Ten Tables.
Boston is very cutting-edge when it comes to local food—the idea fits in well with our much-touted Yankee self-reliance, so check out what your neighbors are doing with that famed rocky landscape.
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