History
Community-supported agriculture began in the early 1960s in Germany, Switzerland and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land. In the 1960s groups of consumers and farmers in Europe formed cooperative partnerships to fund farming and pay the full costs of ecologically sound and socially equitable agriculture. In Europe, many of the CSA style farms were inspired by the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner and experiments with community agriculture took place on farms using biodynamic agriculture. In 1965 mothers in Japan who were concerned about the rise of imported food, the loss of arable land, and the migration of farmers into cities started the first CSA projects called Teikei (提携) in Japanese – most likely unrelated to the developments in Europe.
The idea started to take root in the United States in 1984 when Jan VanderTuin brought the concept of CSA to North America from Europe. At the same time German Biodynamic farmer Trauger Groh and colleagues founded the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire. VanderTuin had co-founded a community-supported agricultural project named Topinambur located near Zurich, Switzerland. Coinage of the term "community-supported agriculture" stems from Vander Tuin and the Great Barrington CSA that he co-founded with its proprietor Robyn Van En. Since that time community supported farms have been organized throughout North America — mainly in the Northwest, the Pacific coast, the Upper-Midwest and Canada. North America now has at least 13,000 CSA farms of which 12,549 are in the US according to the US Department of Agriculture in 2007. The rise of CSAs seems to be correlated with the increase in awareness of the environmental movement in the United States.Some examples of larger and well established CSAs in the US are Angelic Organics and Roxbury Farm. CSA's have even become popular in urban environments as proven by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger's own CSA program that maintains locations in all five boroughs of the city. The largest subscription CSA with over 13,000 families is Farm Fresh To You in Capay Valley, California. The Québec CSA network (17 years old in 2012) is one of the larger in the world. It is a unique system where a non-profit organization reach the costumers for the farmers and provide these farmers with technical support. More than one hundred farms are part of this network. For more info : www.equiterre.org
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