By Marc Eisen
For WisBusiness.com
The local food movement is providing a noticeable boost this spring to Wisconsin farmers who sell seasonal-vegetable subscriptions to families in the Milwaukee and Madison areas.
“We’re having a real growth spurt,” says John Hendrickson, a senior outreach specialist with UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “Local food has just been exploding.”
In Milwaukee, more than a thousand people turned out at a March open house at the Urban Ecology Center. Fourteen farmers offered subscriptions in a program called community-supported agriculture (CSA).
“We saw a lot of people from the suburbs this year,” says coordinator Jamie Ferschinger. “The idea of fresh, local food, and getting it from someone you know, is starting to spread.”
Madison’s CSA program is far bigger. Consumer demand has so grown that the organizers moved the CSA open house from Olbrich Gardens to the much larger Monona Terrace Convention Center, where a record 42 farmers talked to about 1,700 interested consumers.
In 2009, 36 CSA farms sold 7,800 shares and served some 18,000 people in the Dane County area, according Kiera Mulvey, coordinator of the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition, known as MACSAC.
This year, some 9,100 shares are available, representing a potential $4 million-plus in sales to local farmers, she notes.
Buying a CSA subscription, Mulvey says, “is putting your money into the values you support.
The mix of pragmatism and idealism is at the heart of the community-supported agriculture movement. Subscribers pay in the spring for weekly boxes of seasonal produce they pick up at the farm or at drop-off points.
As Mulvey’s group says in its literature, “CSA members invest in a farm and share the risks and benefits of the season’s bounty.”
That means, as Hendrickson says: “If it’s a bad year for peppers, you’re not going to get a lot of peppers in your box.”
Share prices vary from farm to farm, as does the length of the seasonal delivery. “The standard seasonal share through the peak growing season through October is about $550,” says Mulvey. That should feed four healthy vegetable eaters, she notes.
Some farms offer half shares and every-other week service, while some families take weekly boxes but split the contents with another family.
The origin of community-supported agriculture is commonly traced to France, Germany and Japan in the 1960s and spread to the U.S. in the 1980s as a reaction to the industrialization and international sourcing of farm production.
MACSAC was founded in 1991 and was first known as the Madison Eaters Revolutionary Front. “We’ve only gotten more radical over time,” says Mulvey.
Idealism certainly played a role when David Kozlowski and Sandra Raduenz started Pinehold Gardens in Oak Creek as a CSA farm 16 years ago.
“This sounds naïve, but we wanted to make the world a better place”, says Kozlowski, who had worked in publishing. “The idea that you could grow good food and sell it to families you know, that’s become more important than I ever thought it would.”
Kozlowski is aiming to sign up about 160 families this year for CSA shares. He targets people who want smaller boxes of vegetables over a shorter period of time. So he sells his shares for $375 over a 15-week season.
He also sells at farmers markets and to restaurants, a common strategy for local-food vegetable farmers who want a diversified income stream.
On a much larger scale, Richard de Wilde follows a similar strategy. His Harmony Valley Farm in Viroqua wholesales produce to Whole Foods and to various grocery co-ops, sells at farmers markets and is a provisioner to high-end restaurants in Madison.
But Harmony Valley’s biggest income stream is its CSA program. Harmony Valley’s CSA operation prepared some 1,100 weekly boxes last year shared among 2,000 families in Dane County, La Crosse, the Twin Cities and several smaller communities.
Customer loyalty literally saved the farm after a flood swept through the coulees of the Driftless Area in August 2007. Some 250 of his customers donated $50,000 to Harmony Valley, and his farm never missed a week’s delivery during his 30-week season, he recounts.
In early 2008 when I talked to de Wilde about the devastating flood that had wiped out half of his crops, he admitted that in the aftermath he was depressed and unsure if he could even continue farming.
That is, until his customers rallied to his side.
“We got hundreds of small checks in the mail with these nice little notes,” he recounted. “It was an amazing morale booster.”
That demonstration of support is a perfect illustration of how community-supported agriculture forges a bond between farmer and consumer.
As Mulvey puts it, CSA subscribers acknowledge the special status of farmers in society. “They’re responsible for our nutrition, for the care of our environment, and for a lot of other values that are hard to put a price tag on,” she says.
For all its growing popularity, CSA farming is a specialty niche in the wider agriculture world.
De Wilde, who has 100 acres in cultivation and employs 50 people during the summer growing season, says a CSA farm “requires a high degree of organization and communication.”
He grows 151 crops and staggers plantings to keep a steady flow of vegetables for his subscribers. A traditional truck farmer, in contrast, might specialize and grow only four or five crops.
Not all farmers prosper in the system. Rob Baratz, a small Stoughton-area farmer who was among the MACSAC founders, dropped his Pleasant Hill Farm CSA this year after a disappointing 2009 saw a sizable decline in subscribers from the year before.
Baratz, who has 12 acres in production, makes a point echoed by de Wilde: Dane County may be at the point where too many CSA farmers are chasing too few subscribers.
For Baratz, the marketing and tending to subscribers just got to be too much. “I focused my time, energy and passion on growing stuff,” he says. “Now there’s an expectation you have to have a flashy website, and I’ve never done that.”
Not all consumers are cut out for CSA’s either. When I sought comments through a social media network, I heard complaints from former CSA subscribers who had been overwhelmed by the amount of food in their weekly boxes.
“It was way too much for us,” said a man who is married and has a young son. His family wound up splitting a share with another family, but still found themselves baffled by unrecognizable vegetables: Their son didn’t like eating them, and he and his wife weren’t sure how to prepare them.
“I suppose the CSA experience expanded our culinary horizons, which is good,” he wrote. “But both my wife and I work … and we don’t have a lot of time to spend in the kitchen.”
A single woman also said she couldn’t handle all the food. “I used to live with more people and also have more time to freeze/can thing when I got too much,” she said. “Now I prefer to schedule my own freezing and canning … I buy extra at the farmers market.”
Their comments sound familiar to Mulvey and Hendrickson. “For a lot of people, a CSA does not work for them,” says Hendrickson. “It comes down to their busy lives and not having time for home cooking.”
Mulvey adds that consumer education is necessary “so that people know what they’re getting into.” To that end, MACSAC sells a vegetable cookbook, now in its third edition: From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh, Seasonal Produce.
She urges would-be CSA subscribers to shop carefully before picking a farm. “You have to do the legwork,” she says. “Some farms focus on familiar vegetables, while others cater to people who want to be pushed in their cooking and exposed to new and different vegetables.”
Mulvey expects share sales to continue through early June. The big bump in consumer interest, she notes, has been abetted by all four major health maintenance organizations in Dane County offering rebates for subscribers who buy CSA shares, usually from $100 to $200.
MACSAC also offers a subsidy program for low-income families wanting to buy CSA shares.
To learn more about the CSA farms serving the Madison area, go to MACSAC’s website
Milwaukee area residents should check out the Urban Ecology Center’s website
