Market share

Plus:

• CSA directory: Learn more about CSAs in your neighborhood.

Photo: Alexander Milligan

It was a cold Saturday in May when I made out a $375 check to Richard Giles, owner of the Lucky Dog Farm, at his outdoor market stand near my newly acquired shack in the Catskills. In exchange for my monetary commitment, Giles handed me my first package, loaded with vegetables. More boxes—adding up to bushels of roughage—would follow every two weeks for nearly six months.

Giles had invited me to join his community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. I bought a share in his 44-acre organic farm in Hamden, New York, for the growing season; he’d used the cash to buy seeds, pay farmhands and tune up his ’70s-model tractors, and let me enjoy the fruits of his labor for 23 weeks.

I spent that summer and the next looking up recipes incorporating kohlrabi, Jerusalem artichokes and kale, and talking about “my farmer” to anyone who’d listen. Knowing who grew my food made eating it that much more fulfilling. Every meal tasted better.

I witnessed that same excitement earlier this month at a meeting of the founders of a new CSA in Astoria, Queens. Twelve adults sat in a living room on 41st Street, trying to come to consensus on issues including the group’s name, the total cost of a share, and the feasibility of add-ons like fruit or flowers.

Urban CSAs like this one have sprouted steadily since farmers brought the idea to New York City in the mid-’90s. Established programs exist from the West Village to East New York and the North Shore of Staten Island, all of them doing business directly with privately owned farms a short distance outside the city, most within a 250-mile radius.

This year, interest is greater than ever: According to Paula Lukats—CSA in NYC program manager for Just Food, an organization that’s been instrumental in bringing the concept to New York—their number in 2007 will spike to some 50 CSAs in the five boroughs, up from 41 in 2006. Fledgling and long-running groups are gearing up now to recruit members; they offer shares from late-March into May, with the goal of funneling cash to farmers preseason, when capital is most needed.

CSAs function like a members-only Greenmarket. The group finds a distribution site where volunteers meet at the farmer’s truck once a week. Then, shareholders show up and load a crate with the week’s offerings in prescribed quantities. Your prepaid take may amount to seven to ten vegetables per week; some CSAs offer fruit and flower shares, and meat and egg/dairy farmers have gotten in the game, too.

The CSA movement is neither a hippie-dippy co-op crowd nor a rarefied club for foodies. It brings together a mix of people—some of whom obtain shares with food stamps or subsidies—who care about what they eat and where it comes from. With a new Whole Foods Market opening on the Bowery on March 29 and the store’s allegiance to organic growing, local farming and the environment being questioned, to some, the CSA is an appealing alternative.

Back in Astoria, there is concern that not enough people will come on board for Matthew Kurek of Golden Earthworm Organic Farm in Jamesport, New York, to supply their group. “I’m daunted by the number 50,” says Wendy Lehmann, a mother and freelance journalist, about the minimum number of shares they must sell. Despite the uncertainty, the prospective members have already made considerable strides. They’ve secured a distribution site in neighborhood haunt Cafe Bar, and will be setting up tables and produce bins on Thursdays beginning in June. Stacey Ornstein, the group’s leader, and charter member Liisa Yonker are planning member-attracting mixers. The quasi-IT guy, Aaron Freimark, a manager at Tekserve, has already secured a URL (astoriacsa.com) and a Google Checkout account. He’s hoping to participate in a beta pilot of a new CSA-targeted software that its creators plan to introduce at Just Food’s CSA in NYC conference on April 14.

“It’ll be a lot of work,” Freimark says, citing financial planning and volunteer coordination among the many tasks members will have to do to set the CSA in motion. Luckily, they’ll all be eating their vegetables.

[This story was edited to correct a factual error after it was initially published.]