Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Does anyone have any experience being a CSA farmer? We are thinking of building a greenhouse and turning some of our acres into a CSA farm. Any input would be appreciated.

i havent had any experiance with CSA but am starting a 27 acre greenhouse with about 50,000 acres fram land and botinacal gardens ill keep you updated on whats happenong if ya want

Yes, that would be great. I would like to hear about your experience. Thanks. Laurie

I had a CSA for 3 years but quit doing it due to lack of interest and the fact it never paid the bills. If you have not had a market garden before i would suggest that you first try your hand at a market garden and go to farmer's markets for about 4 to 5 years and if ypou still like growing fpor others and have the local interest than start a CSA.

Growing for market is very very different than growing for yourself as failures mean a lot more and with a CSA if you fail there will be a lot of members complaining and not signing up the next season. If you are doing farmer's markets and you have failures there may be a few dissapointed folks but you will not lose your whole customer base as there will be others at the market to take up your slack.

CSA takes a weekly committment for at least 18 weeks (actually it is longer as you will be working for months marketing the concept, planning out what you want to plant and figuring out how much-a lot more than you think BTW and starting seeds, tilling beds etc) of harvesting, cleaning the harvest, writing a weekly newsletter and getting the food to the group. Plus you will have to field complaints, bug members to come and get their stuff (there is 20% to 50% who "forget" about CSA day after 5 weeks) and even bug mnembers abpout paying. At the start your members will be gung ho about participating but thatr enthusiasim dries up within days or weeks of the hot weather setting.

For some folks CSA is a wonderful thing but it is not a money maker. For it to make us money we would have had to charge each member $1000 a season (22 weeks) and that was too high a cost for everyone we had as a member.

I see you are in Iowa which has a good CSA co-op called something like shared harvest. The Growing for Market website may have more info about this co-op

I would suggest reading the books "Sharing the Harvest" and "Farms of Tomorrow". Chelsea Green Publishing carries both