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Community-supported agriculture (CSA) seeks to create a direct relationship between farmers and those who eat their food-- farm members or shareholders. Data from a five-year study of eight CSA farms are used to examine the perceptions and behavior of farm members in three different ways: their motivations for membership, the role of women in initiating and maintaining farm membership, and how the extent of membership participation relates to member perceptions about and commitment to their farms. We interpret the significance of our results using Gidden's concept of modernity and Etzioni's concept of communitarianism. Finally we raise questions about the long-term sustainability of CSA, given the lifestyle and needs of the farmers in tension with the constraints and competing values of shareholders.
Key words: agriculture, gender, modernity, community, communitarianism, CSA, U.S.
Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a growing social movement that endeavors to make direct connections between the producers of food and those who consume it. Its most salient goals address concerns about the quality of the food supply and the survival of small farms, concerns that are to be addressed through building communities of farmers and consumer members. Research on the perspectives of CSA farmers and farm members suggests that this form of agriculture has the potential to solve some of the dilemmas of modernity posed by Anthony Giddens (1991), but only by meeting the needs of both groups. Farmers and members must find a sustainable balance between differing forms of livelihoods and lifestyles which they Cry to achieve through commitment to shared values. In this article we examine data on members' perspectives and behavior to determine the nature of their commitment and raise some questions about the long-term sustainability of the movement.
The concept of CSA originated in Europe and Japan. In the United States, the first documented CSA farm began in 1985 in western Massachusetts (Van En 1988). Fourteen years later there are an estimated 1,000 identifiable projects. Harvest Times reported that in 1994 there were $6 million worth of CSA share sales nationwide (Hendrickson 1996). In the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, the region of this research, the first CSA was founded in 1988, the second in 1990. By 1995 there were 15, and today there are...