Gary Lamb is one of the founding members of Hawthorne Valley Farm's CSA program and a former manager of the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store. He is currently a high school economics teacher at Hawthorne Valley School and is also developing adult courses in sustainable development and alternative economics under the auspices of the Hawthorne Valley Association.
Daydreaming About Seeds,
Community Supported Agriculture, and More
Not only does a farm organism rely on the power of sprouting
seeds but so too all human life is dependent on seeds and the
vegetables and fruits that they produce. Following this line of
thought we can also come to the realization that how we tend and
nurture seeds influences how we conduct ourselves in social life,
including the economy. And it is equally true that the economic
relations and forms that we create and how we relate to each
other in them influences how we go about tending seeds. Each
aspect can work back on the other in an illness-engendering or
healthy way.
For example, an economy based on self-interested behavior and an impersonal market in which consumers have little or no relation to their food sources or producers engenders the demand for industrialized, subsidized, agriculture and genetically altered seeds that produce so-called cheap food. In contrast, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) fosters sustainable agriculture with a diverse seed supply that is continually improved through conscious selection, fair pricing of farm products, and conscious relations between farmers and consumers.
Across North America there are hundreds of CSA projects that have sprouted up, with many more on the way. Where there were once isolated projects here and there, now there are clusters of farms and communities in various geographic regions. New associative relations have not only developed between consumers and farmers but also between local farms through shared production, distribution routes and sites, apprentice trainings, and equipment.
Another aspect of human relations within the CSA movement that could be developed further are those within and between consumer communities. Here in the Northeast local CSA farms typically provide only a small percentage of the total food requirements of member families, perhaps 10% to 15%. If the various consumer communities that surround and support local farms could begin to collaborate together and to take steps toward obtaining all of their food needs in a socially responsible manner, something new and urgently needed could begin to take place: the transformation of the impersonal, competitive, market-based agriculture economy to one based on conscious, associative relations between all participants, whether they be farmers, distributors, or consumers.
There are some simple steps that could be taken in this direction: extending the growing seasons through more extensive use of green houses, creating climatically controlled facilities for a wide variety of storage crops, and preserving and processing more locally grown food. Also, consumer communities could begin to develop relations with and support more distant farms that can provide crops such as grains and fruits that are difficult or impossible to grow in the Northeast. With this goal in mind, CSA communities could "adopt" farms further down the East coast and Central America that could then become economically and socially "related" to CSA communities up North. Even with this more expanded vision of CSA, the average number of miles our food travels from farm to home could be drastically reduced, which, in turn, would reduce the amount of pollution generated and natural resources used in the transport of food.
From this perspective, the CSA movement can be viewed as a seed movement amongst a diversity of other movements with similar ideals wanting to burgeon forth. In the process of building on and extending the social and ethical fiber of the CSA movement we could further develop collaborative projects with other movements such as fair trade, community land trusts, socially responsible investing and philanthropy, renewable energy, recycling, and the universal living wage. To do so, we would be fostering the sociological diversity that a healthy agricultural economy needs along with supporting individual, sustainable, biologically diverse farms.
In my dreams, there is no limit to the depth and breadth that
the CSA movement could evolve into, rejuvenating all of economic
life in the process. They are not the type of dreams, however,
that just happen; they will come true only if we will them into
being worthwhile in the end. 