Community-supported agriculture is providing income for farmers, fresh food for consumers

Succulent and sweet, the early-June strawberries tasted like summer. Nearly 100 Central Iowans had been looking forward to the day the berries would be included in the weekly food boxes prepared by Angela Tedesco, one of the pioneers of community-supported agriculture pioneers in Iowa.

Tedesco and her crew at Turtle Farm worked furiously last week to harvest the summertime favorite in time for the Tuesday delivery to members of her CSA group, who pay $375 a year- more if they want extra strawberries – for in-season vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers, May through early October. Pods had set on the climbing pea vines, meaning more sweat and toil for Tedesco and her crew in a matter of days.

“I’ll go like a crazy person until October,” she said, surveying the six-acre garden – four acres of it are in vegetable production, the other two in strawberries and blackberries – whose bounty includes more than 100 varieties of fresh produce.

Tedesco learned about CSAs in the mid-1990s when she went back to school to pursue a master’s degree in horticulture at Iowa State University. Raised on an Oklahoma farm with a bountiful garden that fed her family year-round, she was a chemistry major as an undergraduate and she worked in a few research labs before marrying and working as a stay-at-home mom. Her children grown, she wanted to start an organic fruit farm and went to ISU to learn how.

She discovered CSAs instead. The concept was fairly new in Iowa at the time, but the idea of a partnership between farmers and community members working together to create a local food system appealed to her. “It fit my values system,” she said. “It’s based on a lot of cooperation.”

Tedesco, whose CSA is now in its eighth season, lays out the arrangement in simple terms: “The customer is supporting me, the farmer, economically. I am supporting them with food, but we are both supporting the environment.”

The relationship between CSA growers and members is a true partnership in that the members share not only in the bounty of the farms, but also the risk. “They support me, bounty or bust,” Tedesco said. “If it’s a lousy year, they don’t get as much.”

Ninety percent of the produce grown at Turtle Farm is distributed to CSA members. Tedesco also operates a “you-pick” strawberry farm and is staffing a small vegetable stand to market excess produce.

She makes weekly deliveries to a convenient location in Des Moines, where members pick up their food boxes. “It’s not very environmentally sound to have them all drive out here,” she said of the 30-minute jaunt from downtown Des Moines to Granger, where Turtle Farm is located.

Turtle Farm is one of more than 50 CSA ventures in Iowa. With about 100 members, Tedesco’s CSA is larger than most, but smaller than some. Many CSA farms, Tedesco’s included, offer certified-organic produce, a designation that requires the land to go through three growing seasons without herbicide or insecticide applications.

“It might be easier to go out and spray something and kill it, but having to cultivate by hand or tractor is more labor intensive,” she said.

According to Tedesco, the added confidence members have in the organic food she produces is worth the extra effort. “These are people who like good food, and for some, it’s important that it’s organic,” she said.

OFF-FARM INCOME

Robert Karp, executive director of Practical Farmers of Iowa, said CSAs are diversifying agriculture in Iowa. “In many cases, they’re creating an alternative to off-farm employment for one of the spouses,” he said. “CSAs are allowing people to diversify farm income and stay on the farm, rather than taking an off-farm job.”

The Iowa Network of Community Agriculture, a group formed to support the CSAs that were organizing around the state in the mid-1990s, is gathering financial data to shed light on the overall profitability of the creation of local food systems. Though that data hasn’t been compiled yet, Karp says CSA growers’ economic viability has been established by their longevity. Some, such as Tedesco’s Turtle Farm, have been perennial providers of fresh produce since the idea caught on in Iowa.

“Their growth and persistence suggests there’s tangible benefits to the farmers,” he said. “There’s no government subsidies to keep these people going.”

Neil Hamilton, director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University and a longtime supporter of CSAs, said growers have to clear some steep hurdles to keep their operations economically viable. The challenges, he said, include “being able to price shares at a price that compensates the person adequately for what they’re producing; expanding the nature of what they provide by adding in meat, dairy, eggs and flowers, so it’s not just a $15 box of vegetables; and developing associated enterprises, such as farmers markets and other forms of direct marketing.

“A CSA as a stand-alone would have to have a fairly large number of members to generate a level of income you can live on,” he said.

Though primarily seen as a source of supplementary income, for ambitious truck gardeners like Jan Libbey and her husband, Timothy Landgraf, the CSA is the family’s economic mainstay. Landgraf recently quit his job as a metallurgist to work full time at One Step at a Time Gardens near Kanawha in Hancock County. Libbey works almost full time at the farm, but devotes about one-eighth of her time to serve as the Iowa Network of Community Agriculture information coordinator.

A newcomer to the North Central Iowa farm four years ago, Libbey said she became entangled in some of the political dynamics of the state’s agricultural landscape, especially those concerning the proliferation of large-scale hog confinements in Hancock County.

In more general discussions about creating sustainable farms that don’t have to rely on livestock confinements or other value-added ventures that carry an environmental price, the talk turned to the first CSA established in Iowa, the Magic Beanstalk CSA, a group of 13 growers and food producers who provide not only traditional garden crops, but also artisan breads; whole grains; free-range poultry; beef and pork free of hormones, antibiotics and insecticides; and fiber, woven and knitted goods.

Though an alternative, CSAs aren’t for everyone, Libbey cautioned.

“It’s a tough step if you are very involved in traditional agriculture and the conventional farming system to step into this alternative,” she said. “Infrastructure is developed around that system.”

Because One Step at a Time Gardens is located in an area with some of the richest soil in Iowa, Libbey opted against an organic farm. “I’m surrounded by conventional agriculture, and if I chose to take that stance that [chemical applications] are bad, what do I do but alienate the community that supports me?” she said. “We need to find ways to walk forward together.”

When he’s asked by growers how to get involved in CSAs, Karp encourages them to “start small.”

“People can start small – they often do – with three or four neighbors and try it out for a year and slowly grow,” he said. “We encourage them to start by selling at farmers markets to get confidence in their production skills before asking people to pay upfront for a season’s worth of vegetables.”

After eight years, some myths about CSAs are being dispelled, according to Karp. He says he’s been surprised by the growth in CSAs in rural Iowa, where some of the experts said the concept couldn’t work.

“There was an assumption at the time that a successful CSA required some type of urban center nearby to draw your customer base from,” he said. “What we’ve kind of demonstrated in Iowa is that you can have a very successful CSA in rural areas. You may have fewer members, but fewer and fewer rural people plant gardens every year.”

Also, he said, CSAs are building new connections between urban and rural Iowans, allowing people who may have a farm background reconnect with agriculture and showing children where food comes from.

Hamilton said CSAs represent a small part of a larger effort to develop stronger local food systems. “It’s given several dozen farmers and producers who have wanted to make those direct linkages an opportunity to do that, and it’s given consumers a mechanism … to have that relationship,” he said. “That’s part of the key – and that’s the reason for the term ‘community.’ It’s expanded the relationship and contacts.”