Full-diet farming: A case study of an alternative model for community-supported agriculture

1. Evaluate the degree to which CSA members’ diets are supported by the farm share.

Is this a truly full-diet farm? What purchases to they make in addition to the share? Have diets changed? What conclusions can be drawn about this as a model for regional agriculture?

The farm offers enough volume of diversity to provide a whole diet, although most members supplement with purchases from the store. Diets have changed for everyone involved, to varying degrees. Farmers are more likely to eat nearly all of their calories from the farm, whereas most members estimated that about 50-75% of their food is from the share. Products commonly mentioned as supplement included coffee and tea, fruit, chocolate, alcohol, and bread and other wheat products.

Several members said that their orientation toward what is “normal” has altered, and they now find it strange to have any plastic packaging in the refrigerator, as they are used to the reusable glass containers and unprocessed vegetables. This suggests a possible “trickling out” effect of the farm on other ways of viewing sustainability in daily practices.

The share has supported regional agriculture in two ways. First, by having a large number of people sourcing a majority of their food from a single, local/regional origin. Second, the farm has played a significant role in changing the regional agricultural economy in the past two decades. When Essex Farm was established, the small, rural, poor county of Essex had existing and defunct dairy farms but virtually no local produce. In the years the farm has grown, it has trained many young farmers who have since left to start their own small farms and CSAs (none of which, it should be noted, are full-diet in the way Essex is). As a result, there are now around a dozen locally-serving farms, more young families have moved to the area, and small community institutions like the school and the Grange have seen more activity.  

2. Determine personal and social aspects of the share.

Are there implications for members’ health? For social relationships? For members’ personal finances?

Several members spoke forcefully about the health effects of being members of this CSA. One woman believes it is literally keeping her alive during an intense chronic illness; one family claims to have not been sick since joining the CSA; a local man believes his physical makeup has been completely changed. Others indicated that health, alongside sustainability and supporting agricultural livelihoods, was a big motivating factor in being part of the share.

Although the share is affordable when compared to the cost of similar products at the store, it constitutes a significant financial commitment for many members. A family of four in New York City, for instance, will pay more than $20,000 per year for the CSA (about $7,000 per adult and $3,000 per child). The local membership is much less expensive, closer to $4,000 per year per adult. While some believe that, especially in NYC, people would likely spend a comparable amount grocery shopping and eating out at restaurants over the course of a year, others felt that it was difficult to afford the share. Conversely, the farm struggles to pay a reasonable wage to its employees in addition to its debt payments, and has recently experimented with eliminating its sliding scale discounts as a way of accounting clearly for what it costs to produce a share.

Echoing much of the literature on CSAs, the farm has historically been an important source of community for many local members, who gather on Fridays for distribution and sometimes volunteer with emergency tasks. Relationships were also a primary way the farm was established and grew, as the owners were able to get inexpensive and sometimes free land, volunteer and traded labor, and are still often able to get low or zero-interest personal loans when income is tight. The social aspects on the farm have weakened over the years as the management structure has become more distancing, as the NYC and non-local shares expanded the membership beyond people who all saw each other weekly, and as the farm has employed new Amish laborers, who have rules and cultural norms about limiting interaction with non-Amish people. This situation suggests that although the social aspects of a CSA are often foundational, they are not necessarily permanent, and need to be cultivated.

This study highlighted the importance of sensory and meaning-filled connection between the farm and both membership and workers. Appealing to people’s senses—whether in the taste of food, visual stimulus of social media, or in the sensory engagement of visiting the farm—is often billed as “marketing.” While accurate, that term is more transactional than it is actually experienced by participants. The farm in this case engages membership and potential workers through farm visits, books, a newsletter, and Instagram, all of which feed connection to what the farm does and what its chosen actions mean on the spectrum of ways food can be produced. Research often reveals the importance of social connections in CSAs; this study showed that the farm share also had spiritual, metaphysical significance for workers and members, access through their senses. This finding echoes a tradition of transcendental meanings of organic agriculture and homesteading (see, e.g., Gould, 2005; LeVasseur, 2017; Robbins, 2019) and reveals its presence also in CSA farming.

3. Gauge the environmental sustainability of farm practices.

How do the farmers conceptualize and practice environmental sustainability? Do practices align with established standards of sustainable farming?

The farm employs many different ecological farming practices, seemingly meeting or exceeding many established organic standards. Their practices include the following:

• Compost of crops, manure, and feedstocks
• Observations of crop and soil health, with some soil testing when required by grants
• Compost temperature testing and turning
• Annual crop rotation
• Soil conservation, including livestock fencing, conservation or reduce tillage, riparian management, winter cover crops, strip cropping, crop residue management, crop rotation with sod crops, perennial crops, permanent vegetative strips on water courses, windbreaks, and quick cover of bare ground on erosion-prone areas
• Soil biodiversity practices, including many of the conservation practices, and building soil organic matter and timing tillage and other farm operations to avoid compaction and erosion
• Water conservation, including varietals appropriate for the climate, management to increase filtration, maintenance of watershed and habitat, vegetated riparian areas, and management of nutrient runoff
• Restoration of native species habitat

• Horse power for maple collection to reduce impact on woodland habitat
• Wildlife biodiversity and ecological balance, including crop and cover crop diversity,

minimizing pesticides, using pest-specific or biodegradable pesticides, designing

fencing for wildlife corridors, and ecologically friendly barriers to invasive species

• Establishment of legal conservation areas
• Only using medications on livestock when absolutely necessary
• Limiting livestock access to waterways and sensitive riparian habitats
• Rotational grazing
• Reseeding trampled or eroded areas

There were two main complications in management of environmental practices. First was that the concept of “sustainability” was an internally-contested one, and the farm did not have an agreed-upon way of deciding between two different ideas of what was more sustainable. For example, some farmers believed that it was unconscionable to use single-use plastics for packaging food, as they are wasteful, do not degrade, and will cause undue ecological burdens to future generations. They are necessary, however, for shipping greens and other products to New York City. This raises the question of whether it is more environmentally sustainable to limit single-use, petroleum-based resources and keep food distribution local, or to feed more people from an ecologically-minded share even if it means throwing away packaging. Different people had different opinions, and the farm does not have a mission statement or other decision-making tool to clarify such tradeoffs.

Second, and relatedly, the growth of the farm has necessitated increased use of things like tractors and diesel power, a departure from the original intent of using animals and solar power to cultivate and harvest food. As more food is produced, as more inexperienced farmers come to work on the farm, it has become less logistically feasible and less safe to use horse cultivation. In this and similar ways, the success of the farm, which has caused it to grow, has also caused it to deviate from some of its initial ecological practices, a catch-22 of CSA success.

4. Analyze the adaptability and scalability of the model.

Is the model meeting farmer and member needs? Does the model seem replicable in other contexts?

This CSA model is mostly meeting member needs. Although many members supplement with other products, doing so is not a significant drawback for them. It is meeting farmer needs to a degree, although workers on the farm discuss the fact that they are choosing a life of relative material poverty in order to do this kind of work; the model supports farmer livelihoods, but in a way that keeps them in marginal financial circumstances, a fact that contributes to farmer turnover and workforce instability. The hourly wage has risen in recent years, but starting rates are considerably lower than the national and New York state averages for farmwork, and unlike on many farms, workers do not receive food for free. Although Mark Kimball is satisfied with his work level and lifestyle, by objective measures, there is still a degree of owner labor self-exploitation, in terms of number of hours worked and compensation. This is not unlike other CSAs.

It seems that this model is not easily adapted to other contexts, for a number of reasons. The owners co-created special economic circumstances, including leasing land for very little money, which is not impossible for others, but requires creative land access arrangements. There are a number of personal connections with wealthy members or allies of the farm that are also integral for keeping the farm afloat during precarious times. The first memoir of the farm has been instrumental as a marketing tool, for members but more significantly for farmers, who read Kristin’s book and decide to join the labor force for idealistic, rather than material, reasons. More recently, personal connections with an Amish community that is migrating from Pennsylvania to upstate New York have resulted in a more stable, inexpensive Amish workforce on the farm. The farm also began in an area that was at the time not saturated with CSAs and thus did not have competition in early years. Such circumstances exist in some parts of the agricultural northeast, but not in all. Finally, the Kimballs are aware of a few other farms who have attempted a full-diet farm modeled on theirs and who failed as a business, which is evidence that the model is not a surefire solution. There is at least one CSA in Vermont that is instead slowly instituting more of a full-diet approach, adding pieces over time rather than starting out with this kind of full-on approach from the beginning. Some farmers suggested to me that it makes more sense to institute full-diet farming from a landscape perspective, in a team of multiple, specialized producers who do not have to manage either the production or the membership logistics required by one farm’s providing of an entire diet.

One potentially replicable activity on the farm is its use of grants especially in building infrastructure. Anecdotal evidence outside this case study suggests that small operations can benefit if they take advantage of federal and state programs, but that doing so requires a level of time, interest, and ability in managing grant applications and reporting.

To institute such an ambitious approach to CSA farming appears to require affordable access to land, a workforce motivated by things other than a secure livelihood, a managerial ability to corral a huge diversity of production tasks, a membership able and willing to prepare mostly unprocessed foods in a market filled with easier options, personal connections for financial continuity without undue debt, and effective outreach to support all of these aspects. This is not impossible, but neither is it straightforwardly replicable.  

5. Assess the full-diet CSA as a comprehensive project in multiple meanings of “sustainability.”

How do different goals (economic, environmental, social) on the farm complement and or compete with others? If there is conflict, which goals get prioritized?

The farm’s primary goals are social and environmental ones and farmers usually talk about economic goals as in service of those two. However, one of the primary contradictions of the farm is that although acting as a business is not the main reason for existing, it must survive as a business in order to keep pursuing this particular way of farming for community and environment. Sometimes, the financial considerations actually get in the way of more lofty goals, as with eliminating sliding scale shares, requiring farmers to have their share cost deducted from their paychecks, or using tractors when ideally they might use horse labor instead. The financial pressures on the farm are intense, from payroll to mortgages to loans to operating costs, and the farm is operating in a political economic context that, among other things, subsidizes industrialized food that makes it hard to compete as a small farmer, does not provide affordable health care, allows enormous levels of college debt with huge interest payments for individuals, does not provide low-cost land that is to be farmed, and generally allows economic precarity that makes it harder for people to afford high-quality and local food and be able to afford farming as a vocation.

This case study suggests that it can be nearly impossible to achieve all three levels of sustainability simultaneously. The farm has achieved success in several ways, including the fact that it still survives in a precarious agricultural economy, that it has grown, that it has consistently fed its membership for over 15 years, and that it has been instrumental in a regional agricultural renaissance. At the same time, it still struggles financially, and its social and environmental goals are often not achievable simultaneous with its economic imperatives. As farm owner Mark Kimball put it, “I think that our environmental shortcomings are outweighed by our social success, and I think our economics is right about at zero, we’re not making money, we’re not losing money, it is what it is.” The data further suggest that as a society we are putting high, multifaceted expectations on the small- and medium-scale alternative agriculture projects in a context without any structural supports for their success, especially supports for pursuing multiple goals that ultimately become tradeoffs with each other.