Community Supported Agriculture – A Winter Sport

The focus of the Kitsap Community and Agricultural Alliance of late has been on community supported agriculture or CSA for short. If you are still a little unclear about what a CSA is let me try to approach it from another point of view. From a high level view all community supported agriculture really means is that a group of people form a connection with their local farm and farmer, supporting them with purchases, investment, advice, work and other things. The way that this is done and the way that relationships are formed are infinitely variable and can be customized almost any way the farmer and the community decide.

There are many benefits for the consumer and the farmer. Buying and Eating Local Food will

•    improve your health
•    delight your taste buds
•    stretch your food budget
•    increase income in your community
•    preserve farmland; and
•    make you new friends

The KCAA is about to make some moves to increase awareness of this exciting new opportunity and let me tell you how.

Now, farms and food production go through annual cycles determined by the movement of the sun, moon and planets. Winter is typically a rest period and in Washington, food is produced at much lower levels than in spring, summer and fall. If you eat locally, you will be eating primarily preserved foods, stored food.

In order to eat the bounty of the harvest farmers are busily preparing in the winter for spring planting. This is the busiest time of year for farm planning, seed buying, building farm infrastructure.

In other words, this is the time of year that the farmer needs resources to deploy to provide the harvest 4 months and later. One of the best ideas about CSA is that the people who will eat the food produced later this year provide the farm with the resources needed to do that. Winter is the time for the eaters to produce instead of consume.

So the KCAA is gearing up to educate the public about the availability and importance of CSAs for farms in Kitsap. One of the ways we will be doing that is to produce some television commercials directing people to a special page on this blog to learn about which farmers will be offering CSAs for 2009.

So if you know any farmers that want exposure for their CSAs, please urge them to contact us so we can put them on. This will help them to fill up their subscriber list.

Oh, and one more thing. Last year, the CSAs that were available sold out before the harvest began in earnest. If we educate more people about this rare opportunity it probably means that they will sell out faster. Please consider this an “insider tip” for our readers and members.

Thanks for reading.