At 5:30 p.m. on a recent Monday, a parade of cars drove up Rix Road, a narrow, curving dirt road in South Royalton, looking as if they were en route to a party.
In fact their destination was Luna Bleu Farm, where it was pick-up time for customers who’d bought CSA (community-supported agriculture) shares entitling them to fresh produce grown on the farm.
Co-owned by the husband-and-wife team of Suzanne Long and Tim Sanford, Luna Bleu was one of the early adopters in the Upper Valley of the CSA farming model.
After leasing land in South Strafford and Lebanon, Long and Sanford bought 43 acres in South Royalton in 1993, where they raise livestock and vegetables.
On pickup day, cars filled the small parking area at Luna Bleu. Customers headed into one of the farm buildings, where they could pick up that week’s haul: generous portions of leeks, tomatoes, summer squash, kale and sunflowers, among other produce.
If shareholders wanted to buy Luna Bleu-raised beef or pork, they could do that separately. Over the years Long and Sanford have added meat, poultry, eggs and other products to answer the market demand for fresh, locally-grown food.
Such changes in the original CSA model seem inevitable, given not only its popularity and maturity as an institution, but also the technology-driven shifts in how consumers shop.
“A lot of farms have found that customers want more product, payment and delivery choices. As everyone is looking for their niche as a business, they’re figuring out a way to be profitable,” said Becka Warren, Valley Food and Farm manager at Vital Communities, the White River Junction-based nonprofit that promotes the development and health of small-scale agriculture in the Upper Valley.
Influenced by similar experiments in Europe and Japan, American farms offering CSAs sprang up in Massachusetts in the mid-1980s, in reaction against the large-scale industrial agriculture that developed in the U.S. after World War II.
There are some 4,000 farms nationally, the majority in the East and Midwest, and on the West Coast, that offer some form of CSA, according to LocalHarvest, a California-based organization that forges connections between farmers and consumers.
And, according to Vital Communities there are at least 28 farms in the Upper Valley with CSA programs. Of those, a number have changed the way they do business, both to diversify their operations and to accommodate customer preferences.
Community-supported agriculture promotes smaller, local farms by offering fresh produce, meat, eggs and other commodities to customers who pay the farmer in advance to obtain that farm’s goods from, usually, spring through fall.
The advantage for customers who purchase a CSA share is that they have access to high-quality goods for six months or more; the advantage for farmers is that they have both a guaranteed customer base and steady income distributed throughout the year, and so are not dependent solely on sales during the growing season.
At Luna Bleu, Long and Sanford have installed greenhouses and increased winter storage capacity. In effect, they’ve expanded their markets and lengthened the growing seasons, making some greens and vegetables available in late fall and winter.
“A whole-year operation spreads out the risk a little more,” said Luna Bleu’s Long.
Depending on a given year’s yield, there is always an assumed risk for both farmer and consumer. If it’s a poor year for apples or a great year for tomatoes, the shares will reflect those fluctuations in the harvest.
“They’re with us on the risk and I want them to be with us on the bounty,” said Chuck Wooster, a Dartmouth College graduate who owns and operates Sunrise Farm in Hartford.
Wooster is just one of the local farmers providing their CSA shareholders with more options: Customers can now, with degrees of flexibility, select what they want to take home, rather than taking a set slate of items each week.
And, recognizing that time is a precious commodity, farmers deliver CSA shares to select drop-off sites, including workplaces, retirement communities and child care centers around the Upper Valley.
“Not everyone can come to your farm, but you still need to grow and to increase revenue,” said Warren.
Farmers have designed websites that are not merely vehicles for information about goods and prices, but also tell the story of the farm, in photographs and prose, as an ongoing narrative. They market through Facebook and Instagram, and take registrations and, in some cases, orders through their websites.
Although none of the local farmers talked to for this story have so-called barn or field cams, there are farms in the U.S. that offer on their websites live streams of their livestock or vegetable fields for that you-are-there connectedness, said Jenny Sprague, manager of CSAs at Edgewater Farm in Plainfield.
“A CSA-er can be really in touch with their produce by looking at where it’s grown,” Sprague said.
And while it may be premature to predict the development of a CSA app allowing you to purchase meat or produce directly from a farm through a smartphone, it’s probably not far off.
At Longest Acres, a livestock farm tucked up in the hills of Chelsea that sells beef and pork CSA shares to individual and wholesale accounts in Vermont and Boston, owners Nick Zigelbaum and Kate MacLean take the bulk of their orders online.
Zigelbaum also accept payments over his cell phone using a card swipe. Given that their farm is off a relatively remote road and that the lion’s share of orders come from the Boston area, such technology is indispensable. “We’re far away. There’s no other option for us, really,” he said.
Sweetland Farm’s Norah Lake and Chris Polashenski, both Dartmouth graduates in their early 30s, bought their original parcel of 87 acres along Route 132 in Norwich through the Vermont Land Trust. (Previosuly, the property was occupied by Hogwash Farm, which moved to Goodrich Four Corners Road and is run by Nancy LaRowe, who also works for Vital Communities.)
Lake worked for five years at Sunrise Farm in Hartford, learning the ropes from Chuck Wooster.
Lake and Polashenski have recently purchased another 100 acres, mostly forest, but with one hayfield. Currently they have enrolled 150 full-share members, Lake said. Their goal is to get to 200 full-share members.
When Lake and Polashenski submitted their business plan to the Vermont Land Trust, they outlined a scenario that provided CSA shares only, through pickup at the farm or through delivery. They drop off shares at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, at businesses in Hanover and Norwich and at Dartmouth College Child Care Center and Kendal at Hanover Child Care.
“You can pick up your little ones and a box of vegetables at the same time,” Lake said.
But as they’ve grown, they’ve realized that they have to be open to such other outlets as restaurant and wholesale accounts, and a farm stand to supplement their income, Lake said.
They’ve added yoga classes at no charge to shareholders (a minimal charge for non-shareholders), which are held out in a field. And they respond quickly to customer suggestions, using both electronic surveys and a suggestion board in the CSA barn.
“We’d love more jalapenos and tomatillos,” and “Please get the email out earlier in the day, to help us plan ahead” were two recent comments.
Lake has found that education is a key part of the job. Some consumers new to CSAs have little or no knowledge of how agriculture works; they haven’t grasped that, in the shorter growing season of Northern New England, there will be less produce early in the season, and an abundance later in the summer.
“We’re educating customers on the ebb and flow of the season,” Lake said.
Sunrise Farm in Hartford started in 2000 with seven shareholders, and now stands at 190, said Wooster.
As the number of shareholders has increased he’s been able to expand the acreage, add meat to the program and throw in a late fall and early winter season.
Looking to the example of other farms, Wooster said, he has settled on a model in which shareholders can choose 12 out of 25 vegetables when they pick up their food — an option that wasn’t possible when they had fewer shareholders because the economy of scale would not have been in the farm’s favor.
In urban areas, where the customer base can range in the thousands, some farms are able to customize each shareholder’s box, Wooster said.
For Upper Valley farms, with a smaller population from which to draw, such customization might never be possible.
And it’s not what Wooster wants to do anyway, because many urban CSA shareholders have a limited, or even nonexistent, connection to the farm growing their food.
“Our specialty is the on-farm experience,” Wooster said.
He’s noticed that some shareholders bring out-of-town visitors to the farm to show it off, and that when he’s signed up some new shareholders who have recently moved to the Upper Valley they tell him that, just as they’ve lined up a doctor, dentist and bank, they are looking for a CSA to join.
That relationship between customers and farmers is what Edgewater Farm’s Sprague most values. The farm has offered CSA shares for eight years, and Sprague has been in charge of the farm’s CSA for the last seven.
“There are some kids I’ve known since they were little babies, and I get to see them grow and I get to see what they eat,” Sprague said.
Not all farms subscribe to the subscription model, however. Janet and Tim Taylor, who own and operate Crossroads Farm in Post Mills, have been in agriculture for more than 35 years, but decided initially not to go down the CSA route when CSAs became more popular
“We already had a lot of paths, retail-wise. We thought we had a pretty nice customer base. We felt we had the community involvement already so we didn’t do it, but then we heard about people doing CSAs through a debit system,” said Taylor.
The way the debit system works at Crossroads is that each shareholder purchases a debit card bearing up to $500 in $100 increments, with discounts available depending on how early a customer pays for the share. The shareholder then uses that card at the Crossroads farmstand to buy any produce or flowers that she’d like; the choice is up to the shareholder.
“We feel that works for everyone,” Taylor said.
While some of the urban press about small farming and community-supported agriculture often promotes images of farming that look as they’ve been styled by Martha Stewart and J.Crew, the growth of CSAs seems to speak to an authentic American hunger for nutritious, high-quality food.
And there’s the communal aspect, one in which consumers are not divorced from the food chain, entering only at the end to buy their plastic-wrapped produce and meats, but are an integral part of the process of farming.
“The big thing for me is not just an economy for the farm, but an economy for the community,” said Long. “We see our farm as a whole system, not just what you can get at farmers markets.”
Through a program called FarmShare, sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Luna Bleu, as do other Upper Valley farms, sells produce at half-price to people who could not otherwise afford certified organic, or ecologically grown vegetables. Long and Sanford also go to farmers markets, sell to the South Royalton Market and deliver to locations off-farm.
But Long still prefers “the integrity of the old CSA community,” where customers come to a farm and interact with the people and animals.
Sprague echoes that sentiment. “CSAs are a gateway to eating local, and to getting to know the farmer,” she said.
There are other reasons to embrace the ethos of CSA farming.
“We like supporting someone providing such positive stewardship for the land,” said Mike Landon, a Strafford resident who now buys his family’s CSA from Sweetland Farm after having been part of Sunrise Farm in Hartford, and previous to that, a farm near Burlington.
Hannah Payson, of Thetford Center, was at Sweetland Farm with her young son and her parents, who were visiting from her native England. Payson is married to an American who was raised in the Upper Valley. They moved to Vermont two years ago after living in London.
In England the family bought what are called “veg boxes,” similar to a CSA, Payson said. But, the vegetables, which Payson said are grown in the Southwest of the country, still had to travel 150 to 200 miles to London.
“I like this because it’s so close,” Payson said. And there are other benefits, such as the pick-your-own gardens for herbs and flowers, and the yoga classes, she said. “It’s a nice value added.”
For Warren at Vital Communities, the CSA model works well in the Upper Valley because the terrain is not suitable for industrial agriculture. But there are other factors in play, she said.
“It’s a real sense of pride. I feel that local food is a tradition for us in both states. … People coming and going see that in the culture here, it’s an expected piece.”
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.
Correction
Nancy LaRowe operates Hogwash Farm on Goodrich Four Corners Road in Norwich while also working for Vital Communities in White River Junction. An earlier version of this story was unclear on this point.