Check out this article that appeared in the Wisconsin section of the Pioneer Press September 2nd!
Community Supported Agriculture thrives around Osceola, Wis.
As hunger for Community Supported Agriculture grows in the Twin Cities, the small-farm community in western Wisconsin is reaping the rewards.
The area is a hotbed for the CSA food movement, in which farmers provide customers a weekly delivery of fresh vegetables, fruits, meats and dairy products. The number of CSAs serving the Twin Cities rose by nearly 50 percent over last year, according to the Minneapolis-based Land Stewardship Project.
It’s a sense of community that makes the area so special, said Christine Elmquist, co-founder of Community Homestead, a live-and-work farm for several families and people with special needs.
“People are very community-minded,” she said of the Osceola area, which Community Homestead has called home for the past 15 years. “We really feel like we belong to our local town.”
Community Supported Agriculture farms sprouted up steadily around the metro area in the past two decades as people learned about the programs and demand grew.
This past year, however, numbers have skyrocketed.
“It’s huge growth,” said Brian DeVore, communications coordinator for the Land Stewardship Project, which advocates for sustainable farming in the Upper Midwest. Last year, DeVore’s organization counted 33 CSAs serving Minneapolis and St. Paul; this year, there are 48.
“We were really interested in watching what would happen this year because of the slow economy,” DeVore said.
“There’s a real desire of going back to basics —people are cooking at home more,” he added. “It turns out to be, especially if you eat a lot of vegetables, a pretty affordable way to get your food.”
Many CSAs serving the Twin Cities are 30 to 90 miles away in western Wisconsin, where the food movement is said to have gotten its start 20 years ago. One of the first such farms was Common Harvest in Osceola, Wis., a village that now serves a hub for several CSAs.
The village’s proximity to the Twin Cities, along with a culture of small-scale farming in western Wisconsin, makes it a prime location for CSAs, said Dan Guenthner, owner of Common Harvest.
“The scale of agriculture in Wisconsin has always been a bit smaller and a bit more family-farm-oriented than Minnesota in many regards,” said Guenthner. West and south of the Twin Cities, farms grow in size, but traveling east, “that isn’t the case so much,” he added.
Patty Wright and her husband, Michael Racette, were living in Minneapolis when they began searching for land to start a CSA farm. They looked at communities about 90 miles out of the Twin Cities — St. Cloud, Rochester, Hutchinson — but the land was priced out of their means.
“It was just so much more expensive in Minnesota,” Wright said. They found more affordable land in Western Wisconsin, and the couple settled on the village of Prairie Farm, where they have run Spring Hill Community Farm for 18 years. The farm delivers about 150 shares of vegetables to customers each week, and all but 15 go to Minneapolis and St. Paul.
There is a unique partnership between area CSAs, which sometimes combine crops to form group orders or share equipment, Wright said. A few years ago, hail destroyed part of the crop at Spring Hill Community Farm, and Common Harvest came to the rescue with green beans.
“That spirit of cooperation between CSAs has been pretty amazing,” Wright said.
CSA farming has been so successful in the area partly because a core group of farmers serves as mentors for the new generation of growers, DeVore said.
“It’s a very good way for a beginning farmer to get established at farming at a low cost,” DeVore said, adding that as the movement has established itself in the region, more people are looking at it as a feasible farming opportunity.
But CSA farming is not without its challenges.
“You need to produce not only one thing but many things every week for the entire growing season,” Racette said. He estimated the failure rate of CSAs is proportional to that of other small businesses.
However, resources such as the Land Stewardship Project “help smooth the road for new growers,” said Racette, who added, “It’s a great time to be a grower.”
Established farms also have to be cautious they don’t get too caught up in the CSA movement’s growing popularity.
“Probably the biggest concern is to grow cautiously and not be overexuberant in the marketing potential,” Guenthner said. “It would be easy for us to add 50 more shares, but we also have to be in tune with our land.”
After the Land Stewardship Project saw the surprising rise in new farms this year, the group checked in with growers to see if the farms were hurting their bottom lines. They discovered, however, that many farms were selling out their shares faster than they ever had, said DeVore.
“It seems like demand is still outstripping supply,” he said.
Andy Rathbun can be reached at 651-228-2121.
ONLINE
For a listing of Community Supported Agriculture programs that serve the Twin Cities, visit landstewardshipproject.org/csa.html.
