IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/agrhuv/v30y2013i1p85-100.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Farming alone? What’s up with the “C” in community supported agriculture

Author

Listed:
  • Antoinette Pole

    ()

  • Margaret Gray

Abstract

This study reconsiders the purported benefits of community found in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Using an online survey of members who belong to CSAs in New York, between November and December 2010, we assess members’ reasons for joining a CSA, and their perceptions of community within their CSA and beyond. A total of 565 CSA members responded to the survey. Results show an overwhelming majority of members joined their CSA for fresh, local, organic produce, while few respondents joined their CSA to build community, meet like-minded individuals or share financial risk with farmers. Members reported that they do not derive a strong sense of community from either their CSA or other forms of community, yet they volunteered at their CSA and appear to be engaged in activities within their communities, though the frequency of the latter is unknown. These data suggest New York CSAs are oriented toward the instrumental and functional models, which emphasize the economic aspects of farming rather than collaborative models, which foster community (Feagan and Henderson 2009 ). Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013

Suggested Citation

  • Antoinette Pole & Margaret Gray, 2013. "Farming alone? What’s up with the “C” in community supported agriculture," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 30(1), pages 85-100, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:30:y:2013:i:1:p:85-100
    DOI: 10.1007/s10460-012-9391-9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10460-012-9391-9
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Conner, David S., 2003. "Community Supported Agriculture Pricing and Promotion Strategies: Lessons from Two Ithaca, NY, Area Farms," EB Series 122132, Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management.
    2. Gail Feenstra, 2002. "Creating space for sustainable food systems: Lessons from the field," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 19(2), pages 99-106, June.
    3. Martinez, Stephen W. & Hand, Michael S. & Da Pra, Michelle & Pollack, Susan L. & Ralston, Katherine L. & Smith, Travis A. & Vogel, Stephen J. & Clark, Shellye & Lohr, Luanne & Low, Sarah A. & Newman, , 2010. "Local Food Systems: Concepts, Impacts, and Issues," Economic Research Report 96635, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
      • Martinez, Steve & Hand, Michael & Da Pra, Michelle & Pollack, Susan & Ralston, Katherine & Smith, Travis & Vogel, Stephen & Clarke, Shellye & Lohr, Luanne & Low, Sarah & Newman, Constance, 2010. "Local food systems: concepts, impacts, and issues," MPRA Paper 24313, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Robert Feagan & Amanda Henderson, 2009. "Devon Acres CSA: local struggles in a global food system," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 26(3), pages 203-217, September.
    5. Tegtmeier, Erin & Duffy, Michael, 2005. "Community Supported Agriculture (Csa) in the Midwest United States: A Regional Characterization," Staff General Research Papers Archive 12577, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    6. O'Hara, Sabine U. & Stagl, Sigrid, 2002. "Endogenous preferences and sustainable development," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 511-527.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sarah Bowen & Tad Mutersbaugh, 2014. "Local or localized? Exploring the contributions of Franco-Mediterranean agrifood theory to alternative food research," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 31(2), pages 201-213, June.
    2. repec:spr:agrhuv:v:34:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s10460-016-9741-0 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Sini Forssell & Leena Lankoski, 2015. "The sustainability promise of alternative food networks: an examination through “alternative” characteristics," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 32(1), pages 63-75, March.
    4. Michael Vassalos & Zhifeng Gao & Lisha Zhang, 2017. "Factors Affecting Current and Future CSA Participation," Sustainability, MDPI, Open Access Journal, vol. 9(3), pages 1-16, March.
    5. Brian Obach & Kathleen Tobin, 2014. "Civic agriculture and community engagement," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 31(2), pages 307-322, June.
    6. repec:spr:agrhuv:v:34:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10460-016-9717-0 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Lydia Zepeda & Anna Reznickova, 2017. "Innovative millennial snails: the story of Slow Food University of Wisconsin," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 34(1), pages 167-178, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:agrhuv:v:30:y:2013:i:1:p:85-100. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla) or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.