Real Life CSAs

How has the community model worked out for small farms?

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Some lives are transformed in a moment of clarity.

Rob Baratz’s life changed the day he realized that what he really wanted to do was be a farmer.

It was 1987. He was standing in a suit at six in the morning, ready to take the train from the suburbs to his job as a floor trader on the Chicago Stock Exchange.

And then he saw the light. Well, actually, he saw the dirt as he gazed out at one of the two hobby gardens that he lovingly tended in his suburban neighborhood.

“I realized at that moment...I thought, you know, I would rather do this all day,” he says. “I would rather grow things and figure out if I could do this for a living rather than take the train into the city to be part of the rat race.”

Soon Rob and his wife, Ellen Meany (the former creative director at Isthmus), were looking to buy a farm, an exhaustive nationwide search that ultimately took three years and brought them to the Gilbertson Farm, two miles east of Stoughton on Highway 51. They purchased it in January 1991, and started farming what was known as Pleasant Hill Farm that spring.

Rob and Ellen realized their dream, or at least their dream at the time. They went on to farm for 20 years, establishing one of the first organic community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms in Dane County. But over the next two decades they also learned that beyond pioneering an organic farming movement, they were also starting a small farming business that would be a constant and monumental challenge, a challenge for which many idealistic would-be farmers discover in practice that they are simply not equipped. 

Cultivating and maintaining a farm brings with it a steep and ongoing learning curve that demands creativity, significant horticultural knowledge, workforce management skills, infinite flexibility, shrewd business acumen, unwavering faith of purpose, some luck and, in the end, always, a willingness to do hard, hard work — harder sunrise-to-sunset work than most non-farmers will ever experience or imagine possible. 

Community-supported agriculture was supposed to make small farming more viable. The idea of selling consumers shares of a farm’s produce prior to planting — thus providing the farm much-needed upfront operating capital and building a strong relationship between producer and consumer — spread quickly. Consumers subscribe for a season’s worth of vegetables, fruits and herbs, and then receive a fresh weekly box of the latest harvest for their payments and support. According to the USDA’s 2012 figures, there are now nearly 13,000 CSAs nationwide.

CSAs are most often done with small organic vegetable farms, providing a level of financial support and security that has not traditionally been available to American farmers.

But the model has not turned out to be a panacea, though success is a hard thing to quantify. There are no records tracking farms that tried the approach and gave it up. Moreover, it is hard to separate the pros and cons of operating a CSA farm from the pros and cons of simply operating a small farm.

But through limited research and anecdotal evidence from farmers, some common themes emerge. CSAs require farmers to market and promote their products to prospective members, not just focus on planting, cultivating and selling their produce and goods. They must also maintain their customer base and be user-friendly when it comes to member requests and complaints (“What am I going to do with all these parsnips in my box!”). Perhaps most importantly, farmers’ incomes have not necessarily improved as a result.

“CSAs have been a huge boon to farmers in terms of providing money upfront in spring, enabling them to plan expenses and eliminating the need for an operating loan,” says John Hendrickson, an outreach program manager at the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at UW-Madison. He coordinates the Wisconsin School for Beginning Market Growers, a program for people wanting to start small-scale organic vegetable farms.

But Hendrickson says CSAs have been less successful at ensuring “fair and adequate compensation for the farmer.”

“Some are successful and can afford health insurance and save for retirement, but a whole lot of farms are struggling to make it work.”

The beginnings of the box

The birth of community-supported agriculture in the U.S. dates back to the 1980s on the East Coast. Dane County’s first CSA coalition took shape in 1992. Composed of would-be farmers, agricultural activists and community organizers, the group called itself the Madison Eaters Revolutionary Front, or MERF, eventually evolving into the more respectable-sounding Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (MACSAC), that’s now known as FairShare CSA Coalition.

In 2012, according to the USDA, Wisconsin had approximately 392 CSA farms. (Exact numbers for 2016 are not available.) FairShare has 59 farms in its coalition this year, according to executive director Erika Jones.

“When the coalition started in the early 1990s, the original eight farms sold a total of 200 to 250 shares to consumers,” Jones says. In 2014 that number had risen to 12,600 shares sold through 50 farms.

Out of the 59 farms in the coalition this year, 20 are located in Dane County. Forty-two of them deliver to sites in Madison and Dane County.

The coalition’s role from the beginning was to promote CSAs: “Building awareness, helping people understand what community-supported agriculture means and how they can be part of it,” says Jones. FairShare does promotional work, outreach and marketing. It produces ads so small farms don’t have to spend time or money doing so, promotes workplace CSAs, helps fund shares for low-income families and sponsors farmer education.

While marketing and finding customers and distribution channels are essential to the survival of virtually all of today’s CSAs, that was not the original intent of the CSA model, according to UW’s John Hendrickson, who himself owns a small farm and was one of the original members of MERF.

“A huge part of the original idea of community-supported agriculture was that it was a way for the farmer to be able to focus on being a good farmer and steward of the land,” Hendrickson says. “The marketing and distribution and sales — and all the work and effort and stress that goes into that — would be removed by having a community of members that would take care of that. But except for a few cases, that has really not been the way that CSA has evolved.”

Hendrickson says there are some farms where CSA members become involved with distribution, finding new members and overseeing the budget, but they’re few and far between. He says there is no one reason for this.

“People are busy,” he says. Plus, some farmers “didn’t want to relinquish control over those types of activities.”

Young farmers

But there are long-lived Wisconsin CSAs that continue to make a go of it.

Spring Hill Community Farm, says Hendrickson, is one of the state’s oldest, and it is doing well.  Located an hour northwest of Eau Claire, Spring Hill is exclusively a CSA. While most small organic farms diversify their distribution and revenue by selling produce at farmers’ markets, and to restaurants and grocery stores, Spring Hill Community Farm survives solely on members who live in northwestern Wisconsin and the Twin Cities.

Its member retention rate is high, and the bond the farm has built with its supporters is strong. When Spring Hill principals Mike Racette and Patty Wright believed their farm workers were not making enough money, Hendrickson says they asked the CSA’s members to support an increase in share prices to give farm workers a raise. They did, and the workers got a raise. It is a great story, a wonderful picture, and it displays the profound opportunity that CSA represents for people who care about where their food comes from and how the people grow it are treated.

Newer farmers are also adopting the model. John Binkley’s Equinox Community Farm, located outside Waunakee, says his first five years were extremely challenging. But, now in its eighth year, Equinox has turned the corner on profitability.

“The last three or four years, we have reached the point where we’re actually making more money than putting it back into the farm,” Binkley says. “The farm is financially viable, and I don’t feel like I’m working for nothing.”

Binkley started with about an acre and sold a handful of CSA shares. The farm has grown to 6½ acres of vegetables. He sells at area farmers’ markets and to restaurants, and now has between 200 and 250 CSA members.

“Having the CSA is the core and base of our farm,” Binkley says. “It’s a guaranteed market, so once the share is sold, it doesn’t matter if it rains or how you do on a given week at the farmers’ market, though having that and restaurant sales to supplement the CSA income is really important, too.”

Five-year-old Vitruvian Farms near McFarland, which starting out selling its product only to restaurants and a few food co-ops, has started a CSA this year.

Founder Shawn Kuhn says selling CSA shares upfront takes a lot of financial stress off the operation. The farm has sold 15 to 20 full shares, 30 to 40 half-shares.

“The frontloaded payment really helps take care of the growing season,” he says. Previously, he would harvest the first crops in April or May and get restaurants the fresh produce the next day. “But they might not pay us back for a month or two, which was always a huge problem.”

Kuhn knows that it can be tough to satisfy all tastes so is experimenting with new marketing approaches, like Free Choice prepaid debit cards, that allow people to visit his farm stand and choose what they want to put in their box. Like shares in the CSA, the card is purchased prior to the growing season. How and when consumers want to use it is up to them.

The potluck of a normal CSA box is a “bit of a give and take,” Kuhn says. “The Free Choice card makes it all a little more malleable.”

Big responsibilities

CSA farms grow multiple varieties of crops, to diversify their offerings. “To do that well is no small feat,” says Hendrickson. “It can be done, and there are farms that are doing it exceptionally well, but it is not an easy thing to do.”

Scott Williams, of Garden to Be outside of Mount Horeb, started as a CSA farm but found he needed to simplify. One of the things that went was the CSA.

“I looked at the CSA as a big responsibility on my part,” says Williams. “You are taking people’s money at the beginning of the year. I didn’t want to give anyone a bad experience.”

And as he and his partner were expecting their first child, the idea of managing that new responsibility and the CSA seemed overwhelming.

“We were 95% of our labor force,” says Williams. “We were unsure if we could meet our commitment to our CSA members.”

Now with two kids, Williams guarantees that “it would have been a disaster.” Happily, the rise in area farm-to-table restaurants has made it possible for him to make a living primarily marketing directly to chefs. It’s allowed him to focus more narrowly than he was able to do with the CSA: “The diversity of work and crops involved in a CSA farm, you have to have so many built-in efficiencies that it is hard to manage. The more you add, the harder it is.”

Rob Baratz, the Chicago stock trader turned farmer, also discovered early on that building and maintaining a sustainable and profitable CSA was not going to be an easy thing to do. He says his farm grew slowly and steadily but a couple of things hit it particularly hard, bringing it to a close.

First, there was increased competition.

When Baratz began his farm in the early 1990s, there were just a few other Dane County farms doing CSAs. But MACSAC was encouraging more and more growers to become CSAs, Baratz says. “I was, like, ‘Guys, wait, there’s a finite market,’” says Baratz.

He felt that the Madison area market became oversaturated: “So you go from six [MACSAC] members to, 10 years later, 50 or 60 farms that had CSAs.” As competition increased, CSAs offered more and more amenities — “egg shares, meat shares, flower shares, extended-season shares,” says Baratz. “I was losing people just to that.”

He also ran up against a problem common to CSAs: high member turnover.

“I was hearing from people, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to support your farm, but we want to support these other farmers because they’ve only been in business a year or two,’” Baratz remembers.

According to North Carolina State Cooperative Extension, CSAs lose between 25% and 70% of their members each season. That flies in the face of one of the original goals of community-supported agriculture: shareowner engagement with a specific farm.

“The idea was the farmer would not have to find a lot of new members each year,” says Hendrickson. “Farm hopping does not help the farmer.”

But the final straw for Baratz was 2011’s Wisconsin Act 10, the state law that, among other things, required higher public employee contributions to health insurance coverage. “That really hurt us,” Baratz says. He had customers, public employee couples, who were losing $800 from their combined paychecks and could no longer afford the CSA.

Costs for running the farm had also risen. “With that going on and with the CSA membership so unpredictable, it was tough,” Baratz says. “Ultimately I saw it as a business model that wasn’t viable anymore.”

Pay dirt

Today, five years after giving up on CSA organic farming, Baratz and Meany are no longer married and have gone separate ways. Meany kept the farm, and her son lives there while attending college. She travels there on weekends from Moline, Ill., where she now works.

Baratz moved to the state of Oregon where he found many organic vegetable farmers growing marijuana on the side just to get by economically — growing marijuana in Oregon is legal. He says he has not lost his passion for farming and getting his hands in the dirt, but now he is working mostly with a marijuana farmer, “trimming” the plants seven days a week.

“It enables me to connect my passion and skill set of over 30 years gardening with work again, into a real job,” he says, sounding upbeat. “It’s something I love doing. I’m not growing vegetables and herbs, but I’m outside growing a really intriguing plant that people really appreciate.”