LESSONS LEARNED FROM ADVOCATING CSAs FOR LOW-INCOME AND FOOD INSECURE HOUSEHOLDS

This paper reports on the lessons learned from a project designed to connect local small-scale farmers with low-income households in the Piedmont Region of central North Carolina. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangements were used to assist farmers by prepaying for fresh farm products. Building community through alternative food systems and civic agriculture underlies the project design of this CSA project. Payments to farmers were made by North Carolina’s food policy council. Selected lowincome households received CSA shares of farm fresh products. Results focus on access to local, farm fresh products, changes in cooking practices of the CSA participants, as well as a sense of community established around food and food access with farmers and others as part of a social food network. Introduction Having visited and worked for several years among farmers and at farmers markets in different settings in the United States, it became apparent that not everyone had equal access to fresh farm products regularly. Struck by the continued support of local farmers markets and for the farmers and their families, something seemed amiss as to the population seen frequenting many markets. A missing group was most often the low-income and food-insecure community members, who for various reasons were not regular members of this social food network. An obvious CSAs FOR LOW-INCOME AND FOOD INSECURE HOUSEHOLDS 117 Since 2000 Project Green Leaf has been located at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro 1 in the Department of Anthropology. Researchers at PGL have been supported by internal and external funding to engage in community development projects among farmers and fishermen in North Carolina. Prior to this project PGL staff members had been working among small-scale commercial farmers and the public, educating on direct marketing opportunities and establishing mid-week farmers markets. question that came to us was how to make farm-fresh commodities available to people much in need of quality food. What would it take to introduce fresh eggs, lettuce, and vine-ripened tomatoes to food-insecure low-income households who lacked the resources to obtain them? Therefore, this paper tells the story of how a group of dedicated researchers worked with the farming community to develop a social food network that would include the poor and the hungry. We outline how the project came to fruition, the funds needed to operate the project, and the lessons learned from working with a diverse group of people who might not otherwise have come together around food and food sharing. Project Green Leaf (PGL) was established to provide assistance to small-scale 1 farmers in North Carolina. In this paper we describe a program designed to expand that assistance to include both small-scale farmers and low-income, food-insecure households in the Piedmont region of North Carolina by bringing these two groups together in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) arrangements. In a CSA, a farmer is prepaid in the winter months for his or her harvests by a consumer who will in turn receive a share of the future harvest. Although some have suggested that CSAs are inherently elitist (DeLind 1999, 2002; Ostrom 1997), our project demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case. Moreover, we show that social networks established around food can reach a wide-range of people and create a sense of community among low-income households and farmers. Several questions guided this project and served to shape our approach to reducing household food insecurities by providing access to farm fresh produce. We asked: Could a CSA arrangement be designed to reach low-income households? How would low-income households benefit from participating in a CSA arrangement? How would farmers with CSAs benefit from such an arrangement? Would new relationships be forged between farmers and their low-income shareholders? The problem of food and low-income households is a complex one. Nevertheless, steps need to be taken to improve food insecure low-income households’ access to fresh produce and their knowledge of how to use these foods while staying within their budgets. 118 SOUTHERN RURAL SOCIOLOGY Increasingly, competition from industrial agriculture and food imports make it a difficult challenge for small-scale farmers and family-labor farms to produce and market so they maintain a livelihood and sustain their farms. Our challenge was to design a project to bring these two groups together in a meaningful way. We asked whether alternative food institutions could be used by small-scale farmers to increase their market share by selling to low-income households who might not have considered a farmers market as their source for fresh fruits and vegetables. In this scenario we anticipated that farmers would benefit from selling to a new population and by building community with a wider net around food and food access. We anticipated there would be benefits to low-income households who would be provided with an easier and regular access to fresh, local farm produce. Background for Engaging in this Project Scientific advances in industrial agriculture aimed at feeding the world have had mixed results (Buttel 2005; Goodall, McAvoy, and Hudson 2005; Heffernan and Constance 1994; Kimball 2002; Lyson 2004; Lyson and Guptill 2004; Nestle 2002, 2003; Shiva 2000; Smith 2003). Conventional agriculture, a commodity approach to global, industrial agriculture, has displaced farmers, compromised the environment, increased poverty and reduced genetic biodiversity (Halweil 2000; Schlosser 2002; Shiva 2000). Although innovations have improved the bottom lines of many agribusinesses, widespread food insecurity among the world’s population persists. In 2001-2003 the FAO reported that more than 850 million people remain undernourished, 820 million in developing countries, 25 million in transition countries and 9 million in the industrialized countries (FAO 2006). In the industrialized world, most food is sold in supermarkets owned by multinational corporations, which consequently influence what is grown, how it is raised, and who is involved in the many facets of its production, distribution and consumption. Competition from industrialized agricultural practices and agribusiness’s corporate marketing has made it challenging for small-scale farmers to grow and sell their fresh farm products, either locally or globally. Globalization and industrial agriculture have displaced farmers and farm land for the past century. According to a study conducted by the USDA in 1997, fewer than half the 6.8 million farms in business in the U.S. in 1935 were still operating in 1964. By 2002 the number of farms in operation had fallen to 1.9 million (Norberg-Hodge, Merrifield, and Gorelick 2002). Halweil (2002) points out in “Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market,” there are several disadvantages involved in buying from the “global vending machine. ” For example, a tremendous amount CSAs FOR LOW-INCOME AND FOOD INSECURE HOUSEHOLDS 119 of energy is consumed by shipping food long distances. Produce grown by the typical agribusiness travels an average of 1000 to 1300 miles before it reaches our tables (Cook and Rodgers 1997; Schlosser 2002). According to Halweil (2002), the typical diet of meat, grains, fruits and vegetables bought in a supermarket can easily consume four times as much energy and produce four times as much greenhouse gas emissions as the same diet grown locally. Foods that require longer transport need more additives and preservatives to keep them fresh and there is a greater chance they will be exposed to contagions along the way (Halweil 2002). In this type of agri-food system the connection between the consumer and the source of their food is lost on the road from farmer to store, leaving consumers disconnected from where, how and by whom their food was grown. Local seed varieties, cuisines, and farming practices are disappearing under global agricultural process. Seasonality is no longer considered a problem in a world where you can get strawberries and sweet corn in January. Some nutritionists have reported that locally grown, seasonal produce is the healthiest available. Nutrients are gradually lost after harvesting because the foods are picked days or weeks before they reach the table (Norberg-Hodge et al. 2002). With the fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified seeds involved in large-scale commercial agriculture, the health of the public and those who work the fields are potentially at risk (Nestle 2002; Shiva 2000). Alternative Food Institutions Unable to compete with industrialized agriculture in both yield and price, smallscale commercial farmers have turned to direct marketing as a niche that large-scale businesses cannot exploit (Andreatta 2006; Andreatta and Wickcliffe 2002; Lyson 2004; Lyson and Gupthill 2004). As a result, alternative food institutions emerged as a way for the small-scale farmer to sell directly to the public and create a local agricultural food system (Guthman, Morris, and Allen 2006). “A variety of formats come under the rubric, including urban farms, food policy councils, and alternative education programs” (Guthman et al. 2006:662). Farmers markets, CSAs and other forms of direct marketing, such as roadside stands, tailgates, u-pick operations, also fall under this rubric and CSAs are an especially helpful marketing strategy for small-scale commercial farmers (Andreatta 2000; Cone and Myer 2000; DeLind 2002; Goland 2002; Grey 2000; Henderson and van En 1999; Lyson 2004; Ostrom 1997). However, one assumption inherent in alternative food systems is that consumers have access or can afford to eat fresh local produce regularly (Drewnoski and Barratt-Fornell 2004; Neault et al. 2005). Several examples illustrate the point 120 SOUTHERN RURAL SOCIOLOGY for us. For example, not all farmers markets are near public transportation; a