And because some produce does not grow in the region, those products provide no direct income to local farmers, precisely the people the community-supported agriculture was invented to benefit.
Last Tuesday, a farm-to-table subscription service called Local Roots NYC dropped off boxes at pickup spots in New York City including a cafe, a brewpub and the offices of BuzzFeed.
Alongside locally grown rainbow chard, romaine lettuce and beets, some members got bottles of olive oil from Italy or bars of chocolate and bags of dried pasta, both Brooklyn-made. From Rustic Roots, an organic-food delivery service in the tri-state area, members could receive fruit boxes stacked with oranges, pineapples and avocados.
Although both companies use the term “CSA,” community-supported agriculture, to describe their service, the presence of a middleman between the farmer and the customer is precisely what traditional CSAs are designed to avoid. And because olives and oranges do not grow in this region, those products provide no direct income to local farmers, precisely the people the CSA was invented to benefit.
Community-supported agriculture was originally defined by a very particular relationship between a farm and its customers. Starting in the 1980s (earlier in Europe and Japan), members banded together to support a nearby farm with an upfront financial commitment to buy its produce.
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It was a private transaction in which all the money went directly to the farmer. It did not rely on distributors or brick-and-mortar stores, and it gave farmers a crucial infusion of cash for the winter, used to buy seeds, repair equipment and expand into new growing methods.
The goal was for CSA farmers and members to build a mutually supportive long-term relationship. Members would get straight-from-the-farm produce from a farmer they knew and trusted, and farmers would get financial stability.
“There’s no other customer that pays you 100 percent, in advance, year after year,” said Maggie Wood, an owner of Golden Earthworm Farm on the North Fork of Long Island. Wood’s farm is entirely supported by its 2,150 CSA members.
As demand for local and organic produce has ballooned in the last five years, so have other ideas for connecting farmers to customers. Now, online hubs are using sophisticated distribution technology to snap into the food chain, often using “CSA” to describe what they deliver.
The term is not regulated in most states, so companies can define it as they wish. Peapod, the online shopping service owned by the international grocery giant Ahold, delivers farm-sourced boxes throughout the Northeast; FreshDirect offers a variety of CSA options in and around New York City.
As the “farm share” concept has spread, the CSA has become just another part of the sprawling, messy modern system of knowing where your food comes from and choosing what you want to eat.
The opportunity for confusion is of enormous concern to many farmers. Depending on how and where these new businesses buy their produce, consumers can receive all the benefits of CSA membership, while the farmers get only a fraction. Some farmers say that after years of steady growth, their CSA memberships have dropped since the arrival of services like Local Roots or Farmigo.
“At first it seemed like these services were going to be great for us,” said Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht, an owner of Garden of Eve farm on the North Fork of Long Island. Some of them supplied software-management programs and marketing tools; others offered premium prices close to farmers’ market rates; others picked up the produce instead of requiring farmers to deliver to a central warehouse.
But the drawbacks can outweigh the benefits. Some say that these hubs have siphoned off their members, partly by offering a more convenient product, but also by blurring the definition of terms like “CSA” and “farm share,” so that customers believe they are directly supporting local farms with their purchases when they might not.
“They are absolutely in competition with us,” said Ben Shute, an owner of Hearty Roots farm in the Hudson Valley. “There are only a certain number of people who will buy food this way.”
Kaplan-Walbrecht said that her membership had dropped from a high of 900 around 2012 to 600 today. Golden Earthworm, Katchkie Farm in Kinderhook, N.Y., and many other local farmers agree that after years of steady growth, they have been struggling to retain old members and attract new ones. And that to compete with the delivery services, they are scrambling to find sources for bread, cheese, fruit, meat, eggs and other add-ons that customers want.
“Do consumers even know that when they sign up for one of these fake CSAs, sometimes it doesn’t benefit local farmers any more than if they shop at the supermarket?” Kaplan-Walbrecht asked.
Probably not. The organic farm boxes you buy online may or may not be local. Local farm boxes may or may not be organic. The farmers may or may not be paid more than wholesale prices. And customers may or may not care.
“I just assume that if it’s organic, it’s good,” said Raquel Hoffman, a CSA member in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, N.Y. “I can’t also worry about whether it’s local, or whether the chickens were happy, and all that.”
Taking the time to tease out whether buying granola made in Brooklyn qualifies as supporting local agriculture can test the patience of consumers. Services like Local Roots offer an alluring simplicity.
“If the goal is to make local food accessible, we need to make shopping for it as much like a one-stop shop as possible,” said Wen-Jay Ying, who founded Local Roots NYC. “People who care about local produce are also going to care about great olive oil, so I’m going to connect them to great olive oil. And that money comes back to support the local food movement, including farmers.”
Ying said that the more food options her customers have, the more likely they are to remain in the CSA, which, in turn, sustains the 15 local farms from which Local Roots buys. Traditional CSAs have a high turnover rate; many people simply find the system too inflexible for their needs.
“If we want the local food system to grow, we all have to grow and evolve with it,” she said. “If you’re stubborn against the change, it’s only going to hurt the local food movement.”
Eric Stone, who oversees CSAs at FreshDirect, said he believed that widening distribution and raising visibility for local produce — as the company’s boxes do — benefit local agriculture in the long term. Hepworth Farms, in the Hudson Valley, packs CSA boxes for FreshDirect customers that are stamped with the farm’s own name and logo. “I really think it gives them a chance to get their stuff out there,” he said. “It expands the whole market.”
Hepworth is an example of an organic farm that benefits from increased options for farmers, participating in a new distribution system alongside its farmers’ market, restaurant and wholesale businesses.
Now that local food has become big business, Target and Wal-Mart are trying to get a piece of it, and even Amazon is delivering locally grown kale. This new demand has been a boon for many farmers across the country, especially large-scale farmers equipped to sell in bulk; new sales channels have been opened that they could never have accessed independently.
Small farmers say they have no problem with new markets for local food; they just don’t want them to be called CSAs.
Paula Lukats is the program director of Just Food, an advocacy and education group for local agriculture in New York state. She confirmed that after a peak in 2010, memberships in community-supported agriculture groups have been going down “across the board.” For the sake of clarity, she said, she wishes that middlemen would stop using the term “CSA” altogether.
“The CSA system was developed for consumers and for small farmers,” Lukats said. “The win-win was low prices and guaranteed income. Anything you put in the middle of that raises the prices for the consumer or takes away money from the farmer.”
But in interviews with farmers, policymakers and entrepreneurs, all parties agreed that for fragile local food systems to strengthen, consumers will have to be offered more choice and control over what they eat than is possible with a traditional CSA.
“CSAs are not for everyone, we know that,” said Maryellen Driscoll of Free Bird farm in the Hudson Valley. She estimated that her farm’s income will be down $32,000 compared to last year from the loss of CSA members. “What’s frustrating is that the copycats have such a lack of transparency, and it’s very easy for the real issues to be glossed over.”
The real issues facing CSA farms and the food system are not confined to the New York metropolitan area. Judith Redmond, an owner of Full Belly Farm in Yolo, Calif., said that membership in its CSA, one of the oldest and biggest in California, has dropped this season after holding steady at 1,200 (with a perpetual waiting list) since 1992.
Redmond belongs to the Community Alliance With Family Farmers, a group that was instrumental in having the phrase “Community-Supported Agriculture” codified by the California Legislature, effective in 2014. It is the only state that has done so.
Ben Shute of Hearty Roots said that there are financial risks for farmers in working through middlemen, and they are precisely the risks that CSAs were designed to eliminate. “Some of them want to have real relationships with farmers, but some are shopping around for the best price,” he said. “When a farmer is growing a certain crop for them, and then they go elsewhere, what is that farmer supposed to do? The product is perishable. Its value has a short life span.”
Some of them have proved to have a short life span. In 2015, Good Eggs suddenly ended deliveries in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans after just one year; Farmstr, started with much fanfare in Seattle in 2013, also closed up shop in 2015.
And in just the last two weeks, 15,000 households in New York, New Jersey, Seattle and Northern California that subscribed to CSAs through a company called Farmigo received boxes that would be their last, as the company abruptly shut down its food-distribution operation — in the middle of the harvest season — to return to its core business: software.
Farmigo, which started deliveries in 2013, fueled its rapid expansion with more than $25 million of venture capital, raised on the strength of a food-distribution software platform that the founder, Benzi Ronen, claimed would eventually replace supermarkets altogether.
Ronen said that was still inevitable. “I never saw a conflict with the CSAs,” he said. “We saw a lot of customers leaving CSAs because they wanted a more traditional market. So we built an online farmers’ market with 700 items.”
But the real-world logistics of washing, packing, refrigerating, distributing and delivering those items to 400 locations proved overwhelming. So Farmigo members lost out on this growing season, and scores of Farmigo farmers were left with fields and trailers full of unsold produce.
Still, Ronen said he did not believe that traditional CSAs are the answer.
“I started as a local-farming fanatic, all the way at the end of the spectrum,” he said. “But I’ve learned that if we want to grow the number of people who have access to this food, there have to be many approaches.”