Progress report for CNE25-007
Project Information
For the 2025 growing season, Choy Commons will launch Asian Vegetable Club, an Asian vegetable CSA led by women Asian American farmers for the Asian American community in New York City. Asian Vegetable Club addresses a critical gap in the sustainable local food market by meeting the high demand for fresh, high-quality Asian produce among Asian food consumers. The farms involved in the Choy Commons farm cooperative include Gentle Time Farm, Choy Division, and Star Route Farm. Outreach surveys have revealed significant interest, with 730 potential customers enrolled in our waitlist from Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Key components of the work plan include conducting targeted outreach to Asian communities, establishing accessible CSA distribution sites with community partners, training site leads on running distribution dates, coordinating trucking logistics and drop-off schedules across three farms and all distribution sites, developing standardized operating procedures (SOPs) with distribution sites, collaborative planning and growing culturally relevant crops, producing educational materials about the preparation and storage of culturally relevant crops, and organizing events to engage and educate CSA members.
Results will be assessed through enrollment and retention metrics, feedback from CSA members, and the financial stability of the farms.
Objective 1: Grow and aggregate culturally relevant Asian vegetables collaboratively with Choy Division (Chester, NY), Gentle Time (Chatham, NY), and Star Route Farm (Charlotteville, NY) to supply 300 CSA members.
Objective 2: Execute delivery, and coordinate logistics at CSA distribution sites
Objective 3: Integrate SNAP users into Asian Vegetable Club
Objective 4: Strengthen a community-owned, local food system through education and engagement.
Anticipated Outcomes:
- A robust CSA program supplying culturally relevant produce to 300 members with high retention rates each year.
- A streamlined logistics system supporting efficient delivery and pick-up operations.
- Increased access to fresh, local produce for SNAP/EBT participants, with measurable growth year-over-year.
- Stronger community connections through education, engagement, and collaboration.
- Secured market access for Choy Commons farms
Cooperators
Research
Objective 1: Grow and aggregate culturally relevant Asian vegetables collaboratively with Choy Division (Chester, NY), Gentle Time (Chatham, NY), and Star Route Farm (Charlotteville, NY) to supply 300 CSA members.
Activities:
- Execute a detailed crop plan focusing on Asian vegetables including but not limited to bitter melon, Thai basil, long beans, napa cabbage, gai lan, and celtuce.
- Distribute 50,000 pounds of fresh produce seasonally through the CSA program.
- Perform weekly field activities, including irrigation, field preparation, cover cropping, transplanting, and cultivation.
- Conduct weekly harvesting and packing of CSA shares, valued at an average of $35 per share, offered at sliding scale pricing.
- Clean totes, equipment, and tools regularly.
- Maintain weekly communication between farms to aggregate products and confirm shared items and quantities.
- Maintain weekly communication between Choy Commons and CSA members to improve education about food items and sustain high quality customer engagement.
- Implement a shared tracking system for crop yields and CSA sales using a spreadsheet.
- Keep up with all accounting, invoicing, and billing
- Collaboratively crop plan as 3 farms in winter 2025 for the 2026 season
- Develop and curate culturally relevant recipes from range of AAP cultures (East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian) for CSA members throughout the season. Include recipes and instructions for meal preparation and produce preservation. Include cultural context and ancestral history. Develop for distribution through email and social media.
Timeline:
- June-January 2025
- June-January 2025
Objective 2: Execute delivery, and coordinate logistics at CSA distribution sites
Activities:
- Maintain active communication threads with all project partners.
- Collaborate closely with site leads to address delivery challenges, provide updates on weekly vegetable shares, and track pick-up numbers.
- Send weekly box counts and location information for CSA pick-up sites to Essex Food Hub, our trucking delivery partner.
- Coordinate with Essex Food Hub for the pick-up and return of totes to farms.
Timeline:
- June-November 2025
- June - November 2026
Objective 3: Integrate SNAP users into Asian Vegetable Club
Activities:
- Collaborate with nonprofit partners including Asian Americans for Equality and Welcome to Chinatown to grow SNAP CSA participation to 25-50 members by 2026 and 100 families by 2029.
- Align all partners on the SNAP CSA project goals, timeline, roles, and responsibilities.
- Gather insights about the community's needs and barriers to accessing CSA programs.
- Develop a payment agreement program that aligns with community needs, while incentivizing SNAP members to return each week (a proven barrier and challenge for CSA members paying with SNAP).
- Identify outreach and enrollment strategies for SNAP participants.
- Coordinate roles for CSA educational workshop facilitation and logistics (e.g., venue, childcare, translation).
- Develop and distribute marketing materials for SNAP/EBT participants in Chinese.
Timeline
November 2025 - November 2026
Objective 4: Strengthen a community-owned, local food system through education and engagement.
Activities:
- Meet with the core planning team to design a plan, program, and structure for farm tours
- Organize and host 3 farm tours/year to introduce members to growers and the growing process and to build connections between CSA community members and growers.
- Create and execute three educational workshops on-farm about Asian vegetables and their cultural significance with an emphasis on farmers and community members to understand food needs better.
- Co-evaluate workshops with community organizations and members in successive years.
- Monitor progress and address ongoing challenges during the CSA season.
- Plan topics and schedule dates for pre-season, mid-season, and post-season workshops and farm tours.
- Coordinate evaluation measures through end-of-season review between farms and nonprofit partners.
- Assess the volume and capacity of the program at the end of each season to inform plans for the following year.
Timeline:
November 2025 - November 2026
Anticipated Outcomes:
- A robust CSA program supplying culturally relevant produce to 300 members with high retention rates each year.
- A streamlined logistics system supporting efficient delivery and pick-up operations.
- Increased access to fresh, local produce for SNAP/EBT participants, with measurable growth year-over-year.
- Stronger community connections through education, engagement, and collaboration.
- Secured market access for Choy Commons farms
Our Asian Vegetable Club members are just as eager to build community as they are to gain access to locally grown heritage vegetables. In their feedback surveys at the end of the season, many suggested additional ways to gather and exchange stories, recipes, etc, including organized potlucks, farm visits, virtual message boards, group chats, and so much more. This is an important reminder that CSAs aren’t just about providing food to people in the community, they’re about building lasting and meaningful connections.
Education is another crucial element of the CSA, and we saw that over and over again. Not only is it important to offer cooking ideas so members understand how to prepare a vegetable, you must also provide storage guidance and context as to how the vegetables are grown. When people understand why a particular leafy green has leaf damage and why that’s inevitable when you’re farming organically in the Northeast, they’re more likely to eat and enjoy it. That piece of context helps save food from going to waste, and it helps farms sell more food. Throughout the season we had many members write in expressing concern over vegetable conditions, and we appreciated having the ability to address those directly, in individual emails as well as our weekly newsletter.
We learned that our members are willing to participate in a sliding-scale payment model, and that we have a lot of members who are able to pay more than market value for vegetables. That simple fact is encouraging, because it means we’ll hopefully be able to offer subsidized and SNAP shares to more and more people in the future. This past season we didn’t yet have the ability to offer SNAP online, so we were limited to offering SNAP at only one location, and only to members who could pay with their physical card. We operated a No-One-Turned-Away-For-Lack-of-Funds policy, so even if a SNAP member didn’t have the money to pay for a share on a particular week, we used our SARE funds to cover it. We saw two members in particular take advantage of that every single week, which signals to us that our approach was successful.
The Choy Commons Asian Vegetable Club ran for 22 weeks from May 29 through October 30, 2025. We served 288 CSA members each week, not including the shares we also provided for our 10 work-trade volunteers who helped run pickups and our 4 pickup sites.
When we launched the CSA, we hoped to provide locally grown, fresh, and affordable heritage vegetables to NYC’s Asian diaspora. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to find vegetables that check all of those boxes, and for small farms like us, it’s challenging to take on a CSA of that scale. All three of our farms worked together to establish a trucking route that would reliably aggregate and deliver our vegetables to our pickup sites—for the CSA, as well as our wholesale arm.
To answer the question of affordability, we used a sliding scale model, encouraging participants to reflect on their financial resources and privilege in order to select the tier most appropriate for themselves. The most expensive tier (tier 1) helped subsidize the lower tiers, and so forth. Our SNAP tier was also subsidized by the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming. And Asian Vegetable Club members did select a range of tiers—by the end of the season, we had 92 tier one members, 108 tier two (the true cost tier), 35 tier three, 42 tier four, and 12 SNAP.
Throughout the season we of course faced many challenges. Springtime pest pressure poses its own threat to vegetable quality and quantity, and we used our weekly email to our members to talk about any pest damage they might see, and what we’d been experiencing on the farms that particular week. That email was the channel we used to share recipe ideas, shoutout mutual aid opportunities, and build a thread between our members and ourselves. It was also where we communicated delivery mishaps and pickup weather delays.
To solicit feedback, we created three end-of-season surveys (for our members, our volunteers, and our sites), and were glad to hear from 143 members (nearly 50%!). We now have a sense of what vegetables were most enjoyed and how we can improve our offering to better serve our community next year. In the future, we’ll be working on expanding our variety of vegetables, creating a centralized forum for sharing cooking ideas, and offering more community engagement opportunities.
Through the Asian Vegetable Club, we succeeded in providing fresh, local vegetables to our Asian American community in New York City, we provided a reliable sales outlet for our three minority-owned and -operated farms, and we did so by communicating our values and seeking out members who share them. Next season we’ll be able to refine our processes even more, offer SNAP online for all of our pickup sites, and build on the community connections we’ve made.
To share a quote from one of our site partners:
“We were impressed with the simplicity of systems and tight organization. It was easy to set up the site each week. These are some of the most beautiful vegetables in New York and it’s really moving to know that there is so much love going into the growing process. Each varietal and harvest detail is apparent in the final product. We were so grateful to on the receiving side 💚” —Katy McNulty, Pixie Scout
Education & outreach activities and participation summary
Participation summary:
Project Plan of Work:
Step 1: Connect with Farms: Choy Commons has been working with 3 Asian led vegetable farms for 2 years prior to the CSA, but with federal funding drying up for our food pantry work, we knew we needed to build out a new market to help the farms sell. Through multiple years of trust building, we built strong relationships, and grew our farms capacities to launch multi-farm CSA. We met to discuss farm financial needs, volume farms could support, and logistics of how it would be run including transportation, payment processing, and marketing. With a strong picture of what the needs and desires of the farms were, we built out our plan.
Step 2: Survey Demand/Waitlist: In the year prior to the launch of the Asian Vegetable Club (AVC), we put out a video instagram reel to ask people to join our waitlist for the CSA share. This video was highly shareable (173K views) and included an interest survey for the AVC. The waitlist did not require any payment to sign up, but did require people to fill out an interest survey. Through this we not only generated interest/buzz about our new project, but we also learned very important information on who we were trying to reach. For example, we collected email addresses, pickup location preferences, recommendations on community spaces that would host our pickups, information of price point of the share that worked for their budgets, preferable pickup times, and work-trade opportunities. We had just under 1000 people fill out the survey, which made us feel great given that we needed 300 people to actually participate. Through this survey we decided on the most popular neighborhoods, community pickup locations, and nailed down our pricing.
Step 3: Partner Site Relationships: The next step was to nail down our pickup sites. Our team, emailed dozens of community spaces in NYC with clear asks for what we needed and what we could offer. Some things we needed were a 22 week commitment, table space to load boxes of vegetables on, accessible buildings that were open late, cold storage was a plus, and a clear place where excess produce that was not picked up could go to. Through many emails and many video calls, we ended up committing to 4 spaces that said they could meet our needs. In exchange, we’d offer them a weekly share. Many of these spaces were very excited to be getting more caring community members through their doors, a big perk for a space/business that would host.
Step 4: Build Digital Infrastructure and collecting payments: Once we had farms, members, and site partners all mostly organized, we used Grownby to build our digital infrastructure to collect member details, payments, and site information. This platform, also a cooperative, was built for CSAs and worked more or less seamlessly to manage membership and payments. We then used Local Food Marketplace, a platform we were already using for our Wholesale program, to track what vegetables from farms to distribution sites, which also tracks payments owed to farms for the vegetables they sell through Choy Commons. We hired a bookkeeper to help with payments as processing 300 members cards/checks, many of them weekly payments, ends up to be a lot of work.
Step 5: Solidify Transport: Transporting, aggregating, and delivering 300 shares of produce from 3 farms, each 2+ hours away from each other, was quite a challenge. We had set out on a plan, which we ended up having to change mid season. Luckily, through working cooperatively with many other partner farms and through the relationships we collectively hold, we were able to quickly shift our aggregation location and change pickup procedures to seamlessly continue delivering our foods to the pickup locations. But this step is not to be overlooked! For us, our schedule went, Farms harvest Sunday and Monday, those boxes are picked up on Monday or Tuesday, then aggregated to a large walk-in closer to NYC. On Thursday morning the boxes are picked up from the cooler and driven to the 4 sites. We also already had deliveries going out on Wednesdays, which is why a Tuesday pickup from farms is important. We collectively use the same trucking partners as other nearby farms (that are not part of our CSA, but have their own markets in NYC) to reduce costs.
Step 6: Pickup Logistics: Once the boxes of food were delivered to our CSA pickup sites, they needed to be sorted, organized, displayed, and distributed to our members. We had work-trade volunteers help with this process. They’d come 30 minutes early, set up the boxes in a market style pickup, write out the display signs on the box (for example: A Choy, take 2), and set up the check in table. They got to know members over time, since it was the same group of people that came each week. They restocked boxes of veg when a box was empty, and communicated with our coordinator if we accidentally ran out of product or there were quality issues. Our work-trade was a 2.5 hour shift in exchange for a weekly share. Our pickup time was 4pm-8pm, and work-traders arrived 30 minute early to set up or left 30 minutes late to pack up. Most sites only needed 1 person per shift (there being 2 shifts), but our large Chinatown site needed 2 people per shift to accommodate 100+ people.
Step 6: Member engagement and Community building: We worked hard to engage with our membership. We set out weekly farm updates where farmers each took turns writing updates of the happenings and challenges they were facing. We sent out “what’s in your share” weekly instagram posts featuring recipes of what to make. This allowed for members to comment on the post and allowed for members to talk to each other about how to use all the food in their share each week. We created a recipe spreadsheet as well as storage information. We also set out seasonal availability cards to put on their fridges, vegetable themed post cards made by a CSA member that has a design company, and stickers.
Step 7: Member & Partner EOY survey: We constantly took member feedback throughout the year, responding to inquiries and making changes based on feedback. Additionally we launched an end of year survey with some prizes attached to make sure people filled it out. In the survey we asked questions like; how many people did you share feed each week? What were your favorite crops? Least favorite? Pickup location suggestions, and more. Through this data gathering, our coordinator created a great slideshow of the survey results so farms could quickly read through the report and we can collectively decide to make slight changes to our offerings, thereby improving each year!
Learning Outcomes
In today’s food systems, we face immense challenges, from undervalued labor and stagnant pricing to inflation, infrastructure gaps, and distribution barriers. In response, Asian Vegetable Club project is a way we seek to transform farming into work that preserves, uplifts, and connects us - while combating the status quo that both only serves the highest bidder, and isolates urban Asian populations from their food sources. We have learned through proven experience that building systems of care and food sovereignty ,intentionally situated outside of the existing exploitative and degenerative industrial food system, is increasingly difficult to sustain as we attempt to prioritize our livelihoods and longevity, despite decades-long movement building and institutionally affirmed alignment around the need to build new food systems for a collectively habitable future. As farming becomes more expensive, we face even greater challenges in securing the resources we need to thrive but are out of reach for us, while it becomes increasingly difficult to gamble the labor of fundraising and grant application production to yield a worthwhile return.
Asian Vegetable Club is a new and hopefully consistent market for Choy Commons. It has been an incredible support for both the quality of life of us as farmers, and for the economic vitality of our farms. After many years of struggling to both pay ourselves living wages, and going into each growing season without contracts to ensure weekly sales, AVC has brought our operations much needed financial security, and peace of mind. At the same time, as Asian American farmers in rural upstate New York, we are very isolated from the cultures we come from. Through AVC we are able to feed people who look like us, who come from the same economic backgrounds as us, and who want to eat the vegetables we want to grow as Asian farmers! The interaction and engagement between the farmers and recipients of the produce affirms the value of ecologically-grown heritage crops, and the importance of having an intimate connection to where one’s food is grown.
Project Outcomes
In today’s food systems,we face immense challenges, from undervalued labor and stagnant pricing to inflation, infrastructure gaps, and distribution barriers. In response, Asian Vegetable Club project is a way we seek to transform farming into work that preserves, uplifts, and connects us - while combating the status quo that both only serves the highest bidder, and isolates urban Asian populations from their food sources. We have learned through proven experience that building systems of care and food sovereignty ,intentionally situated outside of the existing exploitative and degenerative industrial food system, is increasingly difficult to sustain as we attempt to prioritize our livelihoods and longevity, despite decades-long movement building and institutionally affirmed alignment around the need to build new food systems for a collectively habitable future. As farming becomes more expensive, we face even greater challenges in securing the resources we need to thrive but are out of reach for us, while it becomes increasingly difficult to gamble the labor of fundraising and grant application production to yield a worthwhile return.
Asian Vegetable Club is a new and hopefully consistent market for Choy Commons. It has been an incredible support for both the quality of life of us as farmers, and for the economic vitality of our farms. After many years of struggling to both pay ourselves living wages, and going into each growing season without contracts to ensure weekly sales, AVC has brought our operations much needed financial security, and peace of mind. At the same time, as Asian American farmers in rural upstate New York, we are very isolated from the cultures we come from. Through AVC we are able to feed people who look like us, who come from the same economic backgrounds as us, and who want to eat the vegetables we want to grow as Asian farmers! The interaction and engagement between the farmers and recipients of the produce affirms the value of ecologically-grown heritage crops, and the importance of having an intimate connection to where one’s food is grown.
commodity group.
Throughout 2023-2024 Choy Division and Gentle Time Farm completed a SARE research project, Outreach Programs for Chinese Community to Access Culturally Relevant Foods Through Local CSA Models, we conducted research in order to understand the barriers that historically underserved immigrant communities face in accessing fresh, local culturally relevant produce. In this project, we learned that for the communities we serve, barriers include a lack of familiarity with alternative food systems, such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and financial constraints. Surveys conducted at the end of these sessions revealed that most attendees were unfamiliar with CSAs prior to the workshops demonstrating that a CSA was a new concept for many in the first generation Chinese American community. Asian Vegetable Club was built on this foundation of interest.
We believe our project was successful in light of what we learned and experienced. Our end of year survey found that 60% of our 300 member CSA were first-time CSA members, and 85% of our members identified as AAPI. 86/121 members identify as Chinese or Taiwanese. 65% of our members would recommend Asian Vegetable Club to their friends and family, while 35% would consider recommending AVC to friends and family. The high number of AVC members, and active level of participation and engagement of the members confirm the success of the project. Additionally, we believe our project’s high engagement and satisfaction from participants are attributable to our strong partnerships, previous research and planning, as well as the interests, and needs of the Asian American community.
Over the course of the season, the project ran smoothly. Each week we were able to deliver our produce and feed over three-hundred members culturally relevant and hard to access Asian vegetables. Additionally, the much needed funding support from SARE, supported the financial solvency of our farms during a time when minority farmers suffered from federal policies that increased costs and uncertainty for us but provided financial relief that benefits large scale community operations. Integrating a CSA coordinator was also important to the success of the work, not only in running the weekly operations of ASV, but also towards the effort that is necessary to collect feedback towards the end of the year to ensure the success of the CSA next year and future years.
We will move forward and continue to progress Asian Vegetable Year as a collective of farmers working towards collective sovereignty. I believe that we answered our question, how can we address the critical gaps between Asian American farmers and Asian American consumers in the sustainable local food market, through the execution of Asian Vegetable Club the past 2025 season. While the dietary needs of our Asian American community were taken care of, we were able to create a market that actually served and prioritized the wellbeing of the farms and farmers involved.
We content AVC could be a replicable model for culturally rooted farmer-led CSAs that advance equity, and sustainability for consumers and farmers alike. AVC could be a great model for any minority farmer looking for both market access and a pathway towards growing foods of their heritage. Culturally relevant CSAs could also be replicable by food-access organizations serving immigrant communities. This is a path that empowers both the farmers and the consumers, as it is a path rooted in both the autonomy and needs of underserved farmers, while accounting for dietary preferences and economic specificities of communities traditionally left out of the organic-farming movement.
Further areas of study
Engagement at one of our largest distribution sights, Welcome to Chinatown, in Chinatown New York saw a high level of street engagement with non-English immigrant community members curious about the distribution. We contend that more inclusion of Chinese language materials, and presence of bilingual personnel are factors that should be prioritized for upcoming planning and future seasons. We would also like to increase the number os SNAP users but will need to work more with CBO’s to identify these members. While the Majority of our members appreciated the pricing transparency, thought the pricing structure was fair, and thought their share was worth the value,we did not meet the needs of one SNAP member. They write,”
“I understand the fair labor and payment but for the quantity and quality of the shares we received I believed it was unattainable to the community you aim to aid and also those adjacent like myself. Lots of my Asian friends refused to join saying it was overpriced given the quantity and quality after seeing my share and fellow asian folks with ebt said they couldn’t afford to spend their money on the shares given the quantity they can get at local Asian stores”
and
"In comparison, three other SNAP survey participants marked that they thought their share was worth the value. Some feedback from our lower-tier members say they are “grateful for the sliding scale options! i would be down to also add on to pay/tip extra on weeks that work (as someone who was on the lower level pricing)!”