September82009
Found It
Awhile back, I promised to look into the history of community sponsored agriculture, the model that my farm uses to sell most of its produce. Apparently the standard narrative is that CSAs started in Japan in the 1970s when a group of women concerned about pesticides formed subscription-partnerships with local farms, and that this model spread to Europe and the US. While the first part of that is true, it sounds like farms in Europe, inspired by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, had actually been working on similar models since the 1950s. Chile also independently developed some CSA-forerunners in the early 1970s.
[CSA-ing in the the 1980s: Indian Line Farm]
But in the US, the CSA model first appeared independently at two farms in 1986: one at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, and one at Temple-Wilton Community Farm in southern New Hampshire. Both were inspired by European farms; their founders didn’t learn about what had been going on in Japan until after they founded their own CSAs. In fact, both farms were started when Europeans—a Swiss man in the case of Indian Line and a German man in the case of Temple-Wilton—merged their ideas and experiences with those of locals in the two New England towns. Both are still working CSA farms.
But those US pioneers don’t seem too concerned about exactly who thought of what first. As Trauger Groh, the German who helped found Temple-Wilton, put it in an article from a few years ago, “As with all great ideas, the idea of CSA had arrived. It just needed to emerge. The time was ripe. Who started at what hour is totally unimportant. What is important is that the CSA initiative has emerged and developed, and there is now a base for people to carry forward.”
