A Profession of Hope by Jenna Butler

Author:Jenna Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Year of Farm Food:

Community-Supported

Agriculture

NOT TOO LONG AFTER we’d planted our first large garden at the farm, we read Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. At that point, we were already eating, during the summers, from what we called “The 100-Foot Diet” – aside from meat, milk, butter and tea, we harvested just about all of our meals from the garden where we spent our days, cooking and eating in sight of the beds our food had come from. Increasingly, our friends in the city wanted to do the same, and realizing we were within reasonable driving distance of Edmonton, we ran with their enthusiasm and began a community-supported agriculture (CSA) food box program.

These programs have been around in one way or another for as long as farmers have been providing families in town with vegetables, eggs, milk and grain, but they’ve gained considerable cachet over the past fifteen years. When we began Larch Grove Farm’s CSA program, we were feeling our way forward based on what we’d read and learned about from small farmers in Alberta and British Columbia. There were a handful of other small farms around Edmonton offering CSA shares at the time, and these were relatively limited compared to the number of people who were interested in joining the programs. Because this would be our first year as a CSA farm and we were farther north than many of the others, we played a very conservative game with our pricing and offered a ten-week box program in sizes varying from a personal snack box to a large family hamper.

The main thing to understand with a CSA program is that it’s built on faith in both farmer and land. Customers pay up front for a summer’s worth of food months before they actually see the first bunch of spring onions or bag of spinach. The money comes in around seed-ordering time, mid-winter, right when small farmers are dreaming of delicious crops and comparing catalogues, calculating over and over again what they can afford to sow in a given year. The CSA money goes into start-up: seeds, pots, tools and the like. It’s just what’s needed to kick-start a market garden in the late winter.

After that, the contents of a CSA box are up to the farmer, the elements and the pests. Most farms will list the potential contents of a produce box at a number of points throughout the summer, but this can change with crop failure (and, likewise, with spectacular success – you can always tell if a farmer’s had a good kale year!). It may be variable in type, but the food is local, fresh and, with many small farms, grown without the use of pesticides and chemicals. For ten to fifteen weeks out of the year, a family with a CSA share can count on having enough weekly vegetables to satisfy the majority of their needs.

We began our CSA program on request from friends after they

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