Community Supported Agriculture model supports foodA box of vegetables from Community Supported Agriculture farm - picture from Casa farms

Food & Climate

A member of UK Parliament has invited the government to support the Community Supported Agriculture, being its buyers help reduce the environmental impact of industrial agriculture and combat climate change. What do we know about it?

Last week, Jeremy Wright, the Member of Parliament for Kenilworth and Southam, went to see “Five Acre Community Farm” and its diverse production of local, organic fruit and vegetables.

Established in 2012, the farm operates under the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, meaning that the farm is supported financially by community members who receive a weekly share of the produce, he said, according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.

With a strong community focus, volunteers collaborate to grow seasonal crops – learning new skills and building new connections in the process. 

All the produce is grown in the field at Ryton Organic Gardens with minimal fuel usage, meaning minimal environmental impact, he added, according to “Kenilworth Nub News”.

“Up and down the country and in rural constituencies like ours, there are many families that rely on farming for their livelihoods”, he said.

Community Supported Agriculture in Austria

the Community Supported Agriculture farms model, originating in the USA, CSA has taken off in Austria in recent years.

For example, the Jaklhof, a peri-urban family-owned farm run by three generations of women, just ten minutes outside Graz, Austria, depends on Community Supported Agriculture model.

When Anna Fuchs and her late husband bought the land in 1966, they started off raising livestock.

Management was eventually handed to their son; he took advantage of the city’s popular farmers markets by building greenhouses and shifted focus to cultivating vegetables.

This legacy has been continued by his sister, Anna Ambrosch, who inherited responsibility for the farm in 2014. But her daughter Magdalena tells us, sales at famers markets are “very dependent on the weather”.

As a small independent business, it can be tough to keep a farm afloat.

“Small vegetable farms really don’t get much support from the government,” Magdalena explains, even though they are crucial to finding ways to “feed ourselves, feed our community, feed our nation”.

The problem is that subsidies are based on land size, making it harder for family farms to compete with industrial-sized operations.

So, she directed to Community Supported Agriculture model. There’s democratic management, where a collective runs the farm and makes all the decisions, from price structures to crop planning.

Worker Share CSA allows people to toil on the farm in exchange for produce as payment.

In a voucher system, customers can pay up front then drop in to choose what they want up to the value at any time within a season.

CrowdFarming is a digital approach, where farmers buy into a platform that helps them sell direct to consumers who might be far beyond the local area.

But for Magdalena’s family, community supported agriculture more closely resembles a subscription service, according to “Citychangers.org“.

The farm delivers a box of vegetables to customers who have signed up to get one a week for an entire year.

Constant price

The price remains constant for the whole 12 months, but it’s the farm that decides what vegetables are in each box. The one constant is that they’re all fresh, organic, and seasonal.

In one week, they get between 8 and 12 different vegetables.

Jaklhof consistently serves around 150 households this way, and there’s no typical demographic. Around half of customers, Magdalena says, have been signed up since the beginning.

Rather than seeing them as competition, teaming up to offer a greater range of goods – from milk to pasta to fruit – makes the shop and community supported agriculture boxes all the more appealing.

For example, the soil at Jaklhof is not well suited to carrots and potatoes but as staples people expect them in CSA boxes. By coordinating their wares, each farm can meet the community’s demand for good, fresh produce.

It’s really in our hearts to connect with others and to support young farms who want to start; not to see that as competition, because there are so many people we need to feed.

For consumers, CSA is highly convenient. They know in advance how much they’ll spend on vegetables each week and they can collect the boxes from one of any number of handy predesignated stations – from organic food stores in Graz to a private garage in outer lying villages.

“Normally, it’s stations where they can go walking or with the bicycle. So, they don’t need a car to go there, and they don’t need to drive to our farm.”

For the farm, the advantages are amplified when times are tough.

Excess rain and hail impacted Jaklhof’s crops in 2023. With far less to sell, traditionally the farm would have struggled. Thanks to the regular income CSA provides, the farm weathered the storm.