Placing community supported agriculture in local food systems

ABSTRACT

Community supported agriculture (CSA) has grown in recent years as a marketing and distribution option for farmers. CSA involves ‘shareholders’ subscribing to a regular share of a farm’s harvest. The experiential structure of CSA provides opportunities for farmers to develop relationships with consumers and strengthen their local food systems (LFSs). By bringing consumer perspectives into view, LFS development personnel and other stakeholders may better understand where their residents place value within their unique systems. In this manuscript, we focus on the place of CSA in LFSs. Using survey responses from 13 communities in the Southeastern United States, we ask how different aspects of LFSs are perceptually linked to CSA by consumers. From these responses, residents seem to be more aware of CSA if they have knowledge about other direct markets – such as farmers markets or specialty retail stores – or are exposed to local food campaigns and branding efforts. Similarly, residents more positively evaluate CSA performance if they have similar evaluations of direct markets and experience with on-farm activities. These patterns differ depending on the location of the respondent. We see a role for place-based LFS promotion activities and consumer education programmes in most communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Local food metrics
• community supported agriculture
• consumer perceptions of local food

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

Data were gathered using research methods approved by the University of Kentucky (UK) IRB under protocol # 46354.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 According to data downloaded from the USDA’s CSA Directory (ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/csas), only ∼19% of farms offering CSA have offered this option for more than 10 years. CSA has been offered for less than 5 years for ∼57% of the listed farms. And while longer operating farms average larger numbers of shares, approximately half of the total shares offered come from farmers offering CSA for less than 10 years.

2 Personal communication with a national network of CSA providers – The CSA Innovation Network

3 Personal communication with a national network of CSA providers – The CSA Innovation Network

4 Personal communication with a national network of CSA providers – The CSA Innovation Network

5 For instance, 71% of farms offering CSA in the Southeast have offered subscriptions for less than 5 years at the time of data collection compared to ∼50% in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and West Coast. Only 11% of CSA farms were operating their model for more than 10 years compared to ∼20% in other regions. These trends were gathered from an evaluation of the USDA’s CSA Directory – https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/csas

6 i.e. any score other than ‘Don’t Know’

7 Community size is based on USDA RUCC codes. RUCC categorizes counties by whether or not they are part of a metropolitan (metro) area. If they are, they are then categorized by the size of the population. Metro areas with more than 1,000,000 individuals are classified with a 1. Metro areas with 250,000 to 1,000,000 are classified with a 2. Metro areas below this threshold receive a 3. Non-metro counties are described by proximity to metro areas and population size with values ranging from 4 to 9 based on different criteria. We matched RUCC codes to zip codes provided by respondents to match responses to effective population size of the respective LFS. As such, individuals from the same sampling area might receive a separate RUCC designation based on their proximity to a metro area. For our analysis, we classified large, medium, and small locales if they have RUCC values of 1, 2, and 3–9 respectively. See the following documentation for specific code values: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/documentation/

8 We gathered data for this variable from the USDA AMS’s CSA directory – https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/csas.

9 This category includes consumer co-ops, health food stores, delis, fish markets, and artisan markets

10 These are more mainstream market channels where one might still find local foods

11 csainnovationnetwork.org has a number of resources and projects designed to improve CSA access at a national level.

12 https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Local_Food/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Food and Agriculture: [Grant Number 2018-68006-27644].