Sustainable Living Through Community Supported Agriculture Programs

Most Americans buy fresh produce at their neighborhood grocery store as a matter of habit and convenience. The produce is presented so beautifully near the entrance to entice buyers with gorgeous, perfect fruits and vegetables in designer arranged colors and displays. This is the area that Michael Pollen calls the “supermarket pastoral” in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But where do all of those fruits and vegetables come from? Does it matter? Yes, it does. In this article, we’ll talk about why it matters a great deal and how you can know exactly where your food comes from by buying locally grown food from a farmer you know.

Where your produce comes from affects both the price and freshness. It also has an environmental impact with the distances those fruits and vegetables travel to reach your table. Called “food miles” by food ecologists, the distance the food travels from farm to market burns huge quantities of fossil fuel. Most chain grocery stores buy produce through central buyers, which means that the tomato you just purchased may have come from a thousand miles away even though delicious, fresh tomatoes are available from a farm just outside of town.

Significant public health issues are involved in this issue as well. Raw produce can harbor harmful bacteria, including E. coli and salmonella, causing thousands of cases of food poisoning in the U.S. every year. Until recent years, national outbreaks of food poisoning from fresh vegetables were essentially unheard of. Farm or processing contamination in widely distributed foods have resulted in such wide-spread instances of food poisoning as seen in the 2005 Dole lettuce outbreak and the 2006 spinach outbreak that led to national panic. There have been a number of similar instances of food poisoning resulting from contaminated produce that originated far from the locations of the poisonings.

Though locally produced vegetables are not guaranteed to be free of contamination, the source can be quickly identified and remedied should food poisoning cases be tracked to the field as the source. Cases of illness are also considerably more limited in number and scope. Identifying the source is more difficult to do and requires much more time during which more people can become ill when trying to track the source to any of a number of suppliers across the country.

There is an increasing movement of people who choose to buy locally grown food. Those who have local farmers markets can take advantage of purchasing superior tasting, freshly picked, seasonal produce from participating farmers. This also serves the community by keeping consumer dollars local. Another method that has become popular in the last 20 years is through Community Supported Agriculture programs.

The concept of Community Supported Agriculture is simple. Consumers purchase “shares” of a farmer's crops to receive weekly boxes of seasonal produce, typically organically grown, throughout the harvesting season to meet the needs for a family of four. The share may be a variety of vegetables or may include other farm products like eggs, meat, milk, fresh herbs, honey, flowers, and more. It is a partnership between the farmer and the community of shareholders that is a win-win for all. The farmer is guaranteed a market for a diversity of crops and members receive the highest quality of fresh produce, often at prices below retail.