Sending a message to young organic farmers: keep it up!

Dear CSA members,

The network is off to a great start! After more than two months of weekly deliveries of organic produce from five families of the Mae Tha youth group, we now have 30 consumer members, with several people on the waiting list. That works out to 6,000 baht per week or 24,000 baht per month of incentives that we’re giving to young farmers to continue growing food in a safe, healthy and natural way.

Marisa planning her lunch for the day. Mae Tha farm visit, Feb. 2011.

Despite a few cancellations, the feedback so far from both farmers and consumers has been very positive. This really seems like it might work as a sustainable direct connection between food growers and food eaters in Chiang Mai.

I thought it’d be useful to provide some information about the concept of community supported agriculture (CSA), the system that we’re all trying to develop here. As you’ll see, we’re still pretty far from a full-fledged CSA, but that’s okay. This is something very new to Chiang Mai, and it is okay to take careful, measured steps.

What is community supported agriculture (CSA)?

Our CSA will be our own creation – a partnership between farmers and consumers – and should emerge according to mutual agreement. We can decide what it consists of and how it is run. But for the sake of communication, here are a few definitions of CSA:

• A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. Typically, members or “share-holders” of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer’s salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season.

–State University of New York; http://www.newpaltz.edu/green/definitions.html

• (A) farm that is funded by a group of community members. Members pay an annual or quarterly fee in exchange for a weekly assortment of farm fresh produce or other farm products. … CSA helps local farmers increase cash flow and diversifies risk over multiple crops.

–University of California; http://ceplacer.ucdavis.edu/Eat_Local,_Start_Now/Glossary_of_Terms.htm

Organic farming is a way for young people, like these grower-members of the CSA, to stay on the land.

According to these definitions, a CSA is not just a direct-marketing scheme. The idea is a real departure from normal trade relations. A CSA is a profoundly different kind of relationship between the people who grow food and the people who buy it. What we need to consider is how closely we want to approximate this concept of CSA, and how we can achieve our common objective.

Who we are

Around the world, CSA consumers are a slim minority of food consumers. You might consider us a niche within organic food consumption, which itself is a small, but growing, niche. To our knowledge, no CSA exists in northern Thailand, so what we are trying to do is unique and the way forward is uncertain. Let me suggest some things that set us apart from “normal” food consumers. And please ask yourself, do you feel like this represents you?

1. We are concerned about the way food is grown, processed and traded, and we’re doing something about it.
2. We want to be confident that the food our families eat is not grown or processed with the use of toxic chemicals.
3. We do not have much confidence in certification or other labels for so-called organic food produced by the industrial food system.
4. We want to know that our food is grown, processed and transported in ways that do not harm the environment and, ideally, helps to heal the natural world.
5. We support the economic survival of small farmers and want our food purchases to ensure their wellbeing.
6. We feel that the best way to ensure that our food purchases are good for our health, our environment and our farmers is to establish a direct relationship with particular farmers in our locality.

An organic farm, like this one in Mae Tha, is a safe and fun place for kids.

There are some particular issues to address in the coming weeks, such as what to do about deliveries during holidays and the farmers’ need for a new refrigerator to chill the silicon gel packs that keep our produce fresh at delivery. And to really approach a CSA as defined above, we need to learn a lot more about our farmer friends and how they do business. But perhaps we can talk about these core issues first and see where we stand.

This is a really exciting initiative that we’re a part of, and we should all be proud of what we’re trying to do!

Jeff