INCOLN GEIGER NEVER INTENDED TO HELP launch the community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in the United States. In fact, the 76-year-old, who founded Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, the country’s oldest continuously operating CSA program, spent most of his formative years in a small village in southern Sweden.
His parents, a filmmaker and a clothing designer, moved the family to Sweden from New York in the early 1960s. The slow, natural way of life in his new home entranced Geiger. “We had a village sauna because most people didn’t have running water. On the weekend, it was open to the public for the families to come in. The farmers would come in, and we’d hear all the different, interesting latest news about what’s happening in town,” he tells The Rooted Journal. “So I got schooled in the kind of community of a village. Most of us don’t have that possibility anymore.” Because he had lived in two countries, Geiger felt he had a different understanding of the world than the other children in the village. He describes those kids as being “completely immersed in the old side of life. I kind of grew up in a mix of feeling the wonders of modern things and the horror of modern things.” Most of his classmates wanted to “get away from the farm,” he says. But Geiger didn’t. In his late teens, he became interested in biodynamic farming, an approach developed by scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Steiner believed that farming should work in harmony with the land and developed farming methods built upon holistic, spiritual processes. Growing plants, says Geiger, “is totally tied up with the cosmic world just as much as with the earthly world.” He and his brother established a biodynamic farm in southern Sweden in the mid-’70s, which grew into a commune called Mother Earth. They restored an old water mill and built a community around sustainable, self-sufficient living. The commune became well-known for its biodynamic practices and products. Geiger’s parents moved back to the States in 1978, and not long after, Geiger followed. His parents helped him buy 12 acres of land in Temple, New Hampshire. “I had to weigh the benefits and the difficulties of the place,” he says. “New Hampshire is not exactly friendly farming-wise, as far as soil. It’s hilly, rocky ... But that was kind of how I had grown up, because where we settled in Sweden happened to be on a glacial moraine full of rocks.”
CREDITED AS PLANTING THE FIRST SEEDS OF THE CSA MOVEMENT, LINCOLN GEIGER REFLECTS ON WHAT HAS HELPED IT THRIVE FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS.
NATURE by Julie Gerstein illustrations by Jessica Rotter Geiger was driven to start a CSA because he believes that “all people are, by nature, farmers, but not all have to farm. Some of us can take on active farming, and the rest of us will share the cost of the farm, support the economic and cultural life of the farm, and share the food.”
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