CSAs Help Farmers "Dance Among the Giants"
This Column Is Scheduled To Run In THe Capital Press in May 2006Until recently, I was not a fan of turnips. Like beets, I didn’t have much use for them. However, after my family joined a CSA (community supported agriculture), I found myself having to embrace all manner of produce that I would never have otherwise made its way to our panty. Learning how to use all of this produce has been a rich and flavorful experience.
Nearly all of the produce my family eats comes from our CSA, Riverdog Farm of Solano County. Since the farm is located less than thirty miles from our house, we have eaten seasonally all winter. Our winter plates have been graced with roasted vegetables, meat, fish, and potatoes. We use canned tomatoes for pasta sauces and soup bases and as well as jar pasta sauces when necessary. We have enjoyed the process of becoming much more connected to our seasons but it has come at a cost.
“I really wanted to buy some grapes the other day,” my wife, Hana, explains, “but I thought about it for a minute and realized that they are not in season right now. So I didn’t buy them. Being part of a CSA gets you in touch with the seasons and that is rare.”
We appreciate the benefits of the CSA but how does it work for the farmer? I recently posed this question to Tim Mueller, Riverdog Farm’s primary farmer. He answered candidly.
“Our CSA makes up for about 25% of our gross revenue,” he explained. “We have 350 active members and another 50 who come and go. We give our customers $15-$18 of farmer’s market produce per week and we charge them $16. They get great produce at a great value and we get to a steady cash flow that allows us to keep our operation going year round.”
“We are farming 200 acres right now,” he explains. “We have had to learn how to dance between the giants like Grimway and Earthbound. We have several high volume wholesale accounts where we have established a mutually beneficial relationship and nobody gets gouged. These accounts make up a significant amount of our volume. However we still have to sell our crops on the open market and sometimes we have to sell our organic crops as conventional because the giants have pushed the price too low. The key for us is to have a balanced portfolio of customers. The CSA pulls up a lot of slack for us.”
“Organic farming is not a panacea,” Mueller explains. “You still need to develop direct accounts, maybe even more so than on the conventional side.”
As Riverdog Farms supporters, our family has enjoyed the work of Mueller and his crew from the tips of our forks. I believe that CSAs will work their way from the cities to the hinterlands in the next few years. For farmers pondering a move toward organics, they should be an integral part of the business plan: one of the many important steps in the “Dance Among the Giants.”
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 11:04 PM
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