How CSAs Took Root in the U.S.

Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs boomed during the Covid pandemic as city dwellers and suburbanites across the country found themselves avoiding grocery stores and restaurants and spending a lot more time cooking at home, as well as looking for ways to support struggling small businesses, including local farms. For an average annual fee of $400 to $700 per year, consumers buy "shares" from local farms in exchange for boxes of fresh produce throughout a given season. Those boxes run the gamut, offering everything from vegetables, meat, dairy, and flowers to wine and even gelato. But the concept is hardly new: Let’s turn our attention to the radical history of CSAs.

International Sowing

There’s no consensus on the origins of the CSA concept, but similar community farm initiatives gained momentum in Japan, Chile, and across Europe after World War II. In the mid-1960s, a group of Japanese women, concerned about the safety and quality of increasingly industrialized, chemically intensive agriculture, approached a local farm family with an idea to create a farmer-consumer partnership involving direct supplies of organic foods, and the teikei movement (referred to as Japan’s CSA movement) was born. In the late ’70s, proto-CSA models began to take hold in Europe, inspired largely by the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner and his 1920s teachings on biodynamic agriculture and "associative economics," as well as Chilean agricultural unions and cooperatives that sprung up in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Civil Rights and Farm Commandments

At the height of the civil rights movement, Booker T. Whatley, a Black horticulturist and agriculture professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, pioneered solutions for struggling Black farmers, who were often denied loans from the federal government. Whatley eventually published these ideas, gleaned from decades of research, in the 1987 handbook How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres, which is still embraced by small-scale farmers. In it, he put forth a list of "10 Farm Commandments," the second of which is what he called a "pick-your-own operation." The idea, according to Whatley, is to charge local community members a fee, in exchange for which they can come to the farm and pick their own produce. He also advocated "clientele membership clubs," where customers paid upfront for a season of food as a way of ensuring the farm’s prosperity.