Why you should buy local/join a CSA

Many of you who keep up with the news know that there are some scary things happening with respect to the world’s food. Demand is higher due to economic advancement in countries like India and China, and production is down due to unusual weather patterns and a decrease in the supply of chemical fertilizers (which are made from increasingly scarce and expensive fossil fuels). This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine it also cannot help that we’ve been paving over the farmland and orchards of the central valley (which produce 80% of the nation’s food) as if they were wastelands. In the past months, some governments have been placing restrictions on exports, which seems to me to be a good trend– farmers should not be able to sell their food to the highest bidder while the people in their country starve. Alarmingly, this is not the trend in the US, where rich folks are now investing directly in farmland so that they can avoid speculation laws (laws that prevent the hoarding of commodities in order to drive up their prices), and in order to ensure the ability to sell farm products to the highest bidder.

Given all of this, I would like to take a moment to encourage all of you to buy locally or even to join a CSA (community supported agriculture) program. Buying locally helps to protect local farmland from development, and will decrease your dependence on the products of other countries, who it seems will be unable to continue to supply them as the have in the past, as their own populations grow and florish. You can often find local organic farms which do not use chemical fertilizers, which helps keeps the soil healthy, vital birds and insects alive, ground water clean, reduces the global demand for fertilizer, and lowers general consumption of fossil fuels. On this last note, if you buy locally, your vegetables will not have to travel miles to reach your table, which also conserves fossil fuels (which are not only monetarily expensive these days, but which are literally costing lives!!).

CSA programs allow you to pay for part of the farm’s seed, and then to receive part of the crop yield in return. You can usually choose the size of your share, and the length (e.g. full season, partial season, winter…etc.) You typically receive 1 basket of food a week (which you pack and pick up at the farm-fun!).

Find a CSA/Local Farm by you.

Check out our local farm/CSA.