FOOD IS A ‘GIFT, AND
WE DON’T WANT TO COMMODIFY THE GIFT’
FROM ‘CLIENTELE MEMBERSHIP CLUB’ TO CSA
While Van En was working in Massachusetts, Geiger was in the next state over, launching the organic and biodynamic Temple-Wilton Community Farm. “There was a strong sense that food is not a commodity; it is a right,” says Geiger of the farm’s foundational philosophy. “All creatures on Earth have a right to share the food. And so when something grows, it’s primarily formed by outer forces and the Earth, not by the individual who happens to open up the soil and put some compost on. The rest of it is shaped by natural forces.” “It’s a gift, and we don’t want to commodify the gift,” he continues. “So the idea was, we would have a farm that would grow food, people would share the cost of growing the food, and then share the outcome — the harvest, so to speak. And that became the basis of our CSA model.” Initially, there were about 35 members. At a meeting each spring, members went around in a circle and declared how much they were willing to donate to the farm. Over time, as the farm grew to include more than 100 households, Geiger made the process more private. But little else on the farm has changed. “When I go out to grow the food, when I go out to plant, I don’t think, ‘How many carrots and beets do I need to plant to make a living?’” says Geiger. “I have to think, ‘How many carrots and beets do I have to plant to feed this community?’ It’s a totally different perspective, and so when we’re planting, we’re thinking of people instead of money.”
The idea of community-supported agriculture seems as old as time, but in the United States, the CSA movement is fairly new. In the 1970s, Booker T. Whatley, a Black horticulturist and professor at the Tuskegee University in Alabama, created what he called a “clientele membership club,” where members paid Whatley an annual fee to purchase crops below retail price. He explained to Mother Earth News in 1982 that the club model “enables the farmer to plan production, anticipate demand, and, of course, have a guaranteed market.” Whatley’s 1987 book, “How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres,” is considered a foundational text of the movement. CSAs were further popularized in the 1980s by Robyn Van En, considered one of the founders of the U.S. CSA program. Van En launched a CSA program at her Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, in 1985. The first year, “We offered shares of some of the local apple harvest, and members received storage apples and jugs of cider each week,” Van En wrote in 1992. “Most of the families from the apple project bought shares in the vegetable harvest for the following season.” Van En went on to help start more than 200 CSAs around the country. “Because of their guaranteed incomes, CSA farmers are immune to the ‘bigger is better,’ ‘mine is better’ syndrome and are instead focused on finding new ways to cooperate with their neighbors and with Mother Nature,” she wrote for the sustainability-focused nonprofit Context Institute’s magazine, In Context, in 1995.
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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ISSUE 02
FATHER NATURE
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