Should I Start a CSA Farm?: An Educational Video Series for Current & Aspiring CSA Farmers

Several lessons were learned by our farm cohort in the creation of this video series. First, we learned that CSA farmers really care about and love CSA as a business model. Support and interest in this project was widespread, especially in the Midwest region. Collaboration was easy and involvement was wide-spread in this first phase. CSA survey results attached. Survey results

We've also learned how variable best practice is within various elements of CSA across the region and country which led to our incorporation of many more voices and narratives than the 16 we originally wrote into the grant. We are in touch with 20+ farms for their participation and storytelling within the series. Some of these great examples and best practices have already affected how I communicate with our CSA members throughout the CSA season and think about managing stress while farming. 

The most unexpected thing learned through development of the series was the deep need for farmer support networks beyond conference season. Stress, stress management, work life balance and understanding the sacrifices you were making for your business came up often and it was easy for farmer team meetings to turn towards identifying strategies together. Future work will likely move more deeply into this realm. 

Additional findings during this grant from the farmers who created the project were largely based on the format. Ultimately we learned that film may not be the best medium for this type of educational product. It is very time intensive, requires farmers to come in person on filming days (for best quality), and is also fairly expensive.

A webinar series or online course format may have been easier and cheaper to produce. Weaving together various stories and pieces of education through film is a very long process with more time spent upfront on script production and at the end on editing than originally thought. The fact that a webinar or online course style of content could be filmed at home using our own devices and then edited together to create a similar product in the end could create a much more affordable and quicker to produce product (which is good as some content with CSA evolves quickly over time and needs updating frequently). Some education would be lost without B-roll scenes from CSA farms (a definite advantage of film) but perhaps that could be worked in some other ways.

Because the video series was only published six weeks before the time of submitting this report, we are still evaluating how the series is effecting farmers knowledge, attitude, skills and awareness on a larger scale, but we will assess this over time. An evaluation strategy was built into the video dissemination process to track viewership and changes in KASA (Knowledge, Attitudes, Skills, Awareness) as a result of the project. We used two strategies to track the reach of the videos. The first is simply tracking YouTube views. The second includes implementing Bit.ly shortlinks for each video, which allows us to track how many people clicked to access the video from the CSA Starts Here webpage. 

In addition, we implemented evaluation strategies to track the demographic information and contact information of video viewers to learn about the viewing audience and collect contact information for follow up and post-video evaluation. Upon clicking on the link to view each video from the webpage, viewers were connected to a brief form requesting basic demographic and contact information for later evaluation. Upon completing the survey they were automatically directed to the video. The table below summarizes the number of completed pre-surveys for each video, totalling 215. A summary of viewers’ beginning farmer status is below in the purple columns. More than half of the viewers for 8 of the 12 videos were were classified as beginning farmers. 

To assess viewer changes in KASA, a brief evaluation survey was created for viewers to complete after each video. The evaluation request and survey link for viewers is included when viewers access the videos, is in the YouTube description for each video, and mentioned in the end of each video. Even with the strategy, completion of the post-video evaluation survey by viewers was very low, with only one completed evaluation surveys out of 215. Within six weeks of watching the videos, an email was sent to all recorded viewers with a request to complete the evaluation survey, which generated only one new post-evaluation survey. Without these completed surveys, it is impossible to quantify viewer changes in KASA from the video, but it’s not for a lack of trying. A general follow-up evaluation survey is created and will be sent to viewers three months after they watch a video to collect longer term impacts and remaining questions. 

Table 1: Video evaluation data