In about three hours, over 90 neighborhood families will descend onto the front porch, all looking for Georgia-fresh, organic vegetables. Perhaps the oddest thing about it is that this occurrence is now ordinary. It happens the same way every Wednesday, 30 weeks out of the year.

Five years ago, it wasn’t like this. Just like any other consumer, I ran from one store to the next in search of food that I felt good about serving for dinner. Pulling together a meal usually involved trips to no fewer than three stores: one for organic produce, another for meats, and yet a third for specialty items or Georgia-grown produce.
Once in a great while, my schedule aligned with the operating hours of the farmers’ market. And that’s where I met the turnips that changed it all—not your standard purple-topped variety. My awareness of just how good fresh food could be was forever altered, and thus ensued a scavenger hunt in search of conveniently available, locally grown, organic produce.

Over the next months, I was confronted with just how difficult this challenge would be. A trip to the Sweet Auburn Curb Market—home to Georgia-grown produce by the bushel—yielded fare so fresh it nearly begged to be put back into the soil, but there were no organic options in sight. The next stop, a far-off food warehouse that contrary to its “farmers’ market” moniker boasted not a farmer in sight—unless they happened to be shopping there that day—yielded shriveled, organics from Canada.

There had to be a better way! In a moment of inspiration, frustration met with the certitude that with chefs and foodies by the handful in our neighborhood, surely there must be others doing the same driving and facing the same frustrations living right next door. What if a core group made a commitment to one farm; would they deliver directly to our neighborhood?

Community Supported Agriculture: Another Way
What I’d hit on was nothing new; Community Supported Agriculture groups, or CSAs, have been around in the U.S. since the 1980’s. Most follow the formula of up-front payments being made to the farmer in advance of the growing season in return for a delivery of freshly harvested vegetables each week for some pre-determined length of time.

CSAs manifest in different permutations. At first, our farm had us ordering and paying by the week, but since then we’ve gone to three seasons of weekly deliveries, each paid in advance. Other CSAs go through the enrollment process only once a year, at the beginning of the growing season. The form that delivery takes varies, too: ours is usually delivered in a box, but co-op buildings in New York City, for example, sometimes get unboxed deliveries and the customers assemble their own order within guidelines provided by the farm to ensure that everyone receives their share. Davis Farms CSA in Macon has taken an innovative approach where customers purchase a subscription in return for purchasing produce at a discount when they visit the farmer at market.

In the last two years, the number of farms offering CSA programs in Georgia has more than tripled, from eight to 25. There’s been a similar jump in the number of consumers who subscribe: while there were only 400 CSA customers in 2005, as of Spring 2007 that number had grown to 1,400. Most Georgia CSAs, in fact, sold out this year, indicating strong consumer interest in having more than the normative anonymous relationship with the source of their food.

Back in the neighborhood, it wasn’t hard to solicit support for farm-fresh deliveries. Before making it around the block, ten neighbors had expressed sufficient interest to make a tentative commitment. Calling the farms was the next step: we narrowed our prospects down to a few and started the match-making calls to determine which would be the right fit. One of the neighbors had a friend who owned property next to an organic farm in north Georgia, and that’s where we ended up, with Riverview Farms of Ranger. As of 2007, Riverview operates a 250-share CSA program, one of the largest in the state.

Together, our neighborhood group has weathered flats of strawberries in the spring, the unrelenting arugula onslaught of 2004, thin harvests of September 2005, more butternut squashes than most people would aggressively consume in a quarter, and more than a few vegetables alien to the grocery store. We learned that joyful participation requires an adventurous culinary spirit. The happiest subscribers are not intimidated by the single-item bounty that can sometimes hit, or the natural narrowing that occurs with a seasonal harvest as opposed to the globally sourced, broad-spectrum of produce available in a commercial store. With this mindset, each weekly delivery builds delicious anticipation.

The greatest bounty of all, however, hasn’t come in the box: we’ve found greater connections building within our neighborhood. We enjoy a sweet snack at pickup, share stories and recipes on the porch, and enjoy the fruits—quite literally—that our cooperative venture has fostered each time we sit down to a meal.

Neighbor, and subscriber, Melissa Devereaux shares her perspective with me. “I think more than the food, though, (our group) gets to something basic in all of us—we want to know and be known, to connect. Not even the friendliest supermarket can provide that! My children are tuned into this connectivity, too. Every time we drive by your house they say, is it Wednesday yet?”

Suzanne Welander is the communications director for Georgia Organics, a nonprofit organization working to integrate healthy, sustainable, and locally grown food into the lives of all Georgians. In addition to Georgia’s Local Food Guide, Georgia Organics publishes a seasonal harvest calendar to help consumers and chefs know what to expect from local farmers throughout the year, available at www.georgiaorganics.org.

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