G00-1419 Community Supported Agriculture

Urban Farm DB summary

This NebGuide, published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is a practical explainer describing what community-supported agriculture (CSA) is, how it works, and what producers need to do to participate — not an empirical study. At the time of writing, most Nebraskans had not heard of CSA, though the concept was about three decades old in Japan and Europe and 10-15 years old on the US East Coast. In Japan, amid continued loss of farmland to urbanization and farmers' migration to cities, a group of women approached local farm families proposing direct marketing of produce to urban residents; the resulting cooperative buying-club arrangement, called teikei, now involves millions of people. In Europe, farmers and community members concerned about food-system industrialization started the CSA model in the early 1970s. In the United States, two farms in the eastern US began CSAs based on the European model in 1986, and the guide states that more than 1,500 CSA farms existed across the country by the time of publication.