Community supported agriculture (CSA)

What is community supported agriculture?

Community supported agriculture, CSA for short, is an agreement between a farm and the people it feeds. A group of households commits to the farm for a season or a year and pays its costs in advance: seed, tools, land, upkeep and a fair wage for those who work there. In return the members receive a share of whatever the farm grows, usually as a weekly box or at a pick-up point. The food no longer carries a price per kilo. It is a share of a common harvest.

Two things are shared in this way. The harvest is shared, so that a good year brings full boxes for everyone. And the risk is shared: if hail flattens the tomatoes or a dry spring holds back the beans, the members carry the loss together with the farmers instead of leaving it to them alone. In German-speaking countries the model is called Solidarische Landwirtschaft, solidarity agriculture, or Solawi for short. In Japan an older form is known as teikei, partnership.

How it works: budget, contribution, share

Most CSA farms begin the year with a budget. The farmers set out what the coming season will cost, and the members cover that sum between them. Some farms divide it into equal shares. Others, especially in Germany, use a bidding round. Each member notes anonymously what they can pay, the figures are added up, and the round is repeated until the budget is met. NABU describes this practice at the Buschberghof near Hamburg: every member writes on a slip of paper how much they want to pay, so that those with more contribute more and those with less still receive the same share.

The contribution does not buy a quantity. At the Buschberghof the amount pledged does not depend on how much food a household takes home. What everyone receives is a share of the year's harvest, larger in a rich summer and smaller after a poor one.

Many CSAs ask for more than money. Members help with the harvest, pack boxes or join the yearly meeting at which the budget is agreed. At Arvaia in Bologna, members also contribute their skills and a few half days of work each year. The farm gains planning security and the members gain a direct view of where their food comes from.

Where it comes from

Several roots grew at about the same time. In Japan, consumers worried about pesticides and farmers who wanted to grow without them formed direct partnerships. The Japan Organic Agriculture Association, founded in 1971, describes teikei as a co-partnership between producers and consumers outside the conventional market. In November 1978 its members summarised years of practice in the Ten Principles of Teikei. The produce often reaches the households through delivery stations, each serving three to ten nearby families.

In Europe, ideas drawn from Rudolf Steiner's social thought were tried out on biodynamic farms from the 1950s onwards. The Buschberghof in Fuhlenhagen, east of Hamburg, placed its land in a non-profit land trust in 1968, so that it could never be sold or burdened with debt. In 1988, after a change of generation, its farmers started a community scheme, with 40 families at first; the farm shop closed once the scheme had proved itself. The Buschberghof is regarded as the first farm of this kind in Germany. In 2014, according to NABU, it supplied 95 households with about 300 people.

In the United States the form took shape in 1986, when two farms began independently of each other: Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts and Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire. Jan Vander Tuin, who had worked on a farm near Zurich and knew similar projects in Switzerland and Germany, brought the idea to Massachusetts and started it with Robyn Van En and others on land at Indian Line Farm. Some accounts date the beginning to autumn 1985, when the group sold its first shares of apples.

Networks today

In Germany, farms and members founded the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft in 2011. It advises new groups and keeps a list of existing ones. Their number has grown into the hundreds: at a webinar held by the Federal Agricultural Information Centre and the network in early 2022, between 300 and 400 farms were named. Internationally, URGENCI, created in 2006, links movements that grew under different names, among them teikei in Japan, the AMAP in France and the Voedselteams in Belgium.

In Italy the most widespread form of direct partnership is the gruppo di acquisto solidale, GAS for short, a solidarity purchasing group. The movement dates its beginnings to 1994 in Emilia-Romagna, where a group in Fidenza is counted among the first, and in 2024 the newspaper Avvenire put the number of groups at no fewer than twice the 1,000 on record. A GAS buys together and directly from chosen producers. A CSA in the narrower sense also takes on the farm's budget and risk. One example is Arvaia in Bologna, a cooperative founded in 2013, which farms 47 hectares on the edge of the city on land granted by the municipality. Its members take part in the basic decisions and the financing, share risks and benefits and receive the harvest in equal shares.

Strengths and limits

For farmers the main strength is security. The money for the season is there before the first seed is sown, the buyers are known, and the loss of a bad year is carried by many households instead of by the farm alone. Members receive fresh food from a farm they can visit, and they see what weather, soil and work mean for a harvest. Farms with a stable community can plan for the long term, from hedges to crop rotations, instead of chasing the price of the next market day. Herdade do Freixo do Meio in Portugal is one estate that sells part of its produce through such a scheme.

The limits are just as real. Members take what the season brings, which can mean weeks of the same vegetables. Pick-ups, shared tasks and meetings take time, and a group has to renew itself as households move away. A budget set too low shifts the risk back onto the wages of the farmers. And a CSA feeds dozens or hundreds of households, not whole cities. It complements markets and shops; it does not replace them.

CSA in the light of permaculture

David Holmgren counts finance and economics among the domains of the permaculture flower, the areas in which permaculture thinking can be applied. Community supported agriculture is one of the clearest examples there. It is an invisible structure: it moves no soil and plants no tree, but it decides whether a farm can last.

The principle obtain a yield applies to both sides. The farmers obtain an income at the start of the season, and the members obtain food, knowledge and a relationship with a piece of land. The ethic of fair share, one of the three ethics of permaculture, appears in its plainest form: the harvest is divided, and those with more can carry more of the cost. A CSA is also a small and slow solution. It grows with its community, not ahead of it.

Because the members pay for the farm as a whole rather than for single products, a CSA can make room for work that no market pays for: hedges, flowering margins, resting ground. These are part of what the land gives beyond its harvest, the ecosystem services on which every farm depends.

How Terra Humana understands community supported agriculture

For Terra Humana, community supported agriculture shows that an economy can follow the same rules as a living landscape: cycles instead of one-way flows, relationships instead of anonymous trade, and risk carried by many shoulders instead of one. It is a structure in which caring for land and caring for people become the same task. We describe it here as a proven model from many countries, not as something we practise ourselves, and we report only what we do.