~ Nurturing a Sense of Place through CSA Farming ~

I sat all afternoon behind my dorm room looking out over newly green trees and grass. I have been here for four years and each year I notice the same spring phenomenon. Winters in this region are quiet and fierce. The campus endures a four-month stupor. Only bitter winds blow across vacant soccer fields. In April the land begins to wake, stretching creaky limbs. Slowly snow melts and the rain comes. Seemingly overnight the campus is vibrant, a crisp green, the grass spongy and smelling of humus. Paths unused are once again walked upon. Every year without fail the people come creeping out of their winter nooks to get drunk on plum blossoms and the freedom of bare skin. Fish-belly white and shameless we come out and dance in the spring unself-consciously—grateful and upheld by the knowledge that faithfully, the seasons have come round again.
Perhaps in “freeing” ourselves from being “tied to the land” we have celebrated the accumulation of so many wooden nickels only to realize the bank is bust. Watching these joyous faces dance in the spring I think it is in our bones, this being tied to the land.

Sometimes I am overcome with despair. I see the hundreds of good and loving people around me and we just cannot seem to get it right. We build up statues to false gods and then we rage when they do not grant up peaceful hearts. Species extinction continues at a prodigious rate. We are at war and do not seem to notice. Ancient forests come down, muddying our waters. Ancient forests become track homes and suburbs with high, high fences. Fences so high we cannot see our neighbor who sits at his garden table by his manicured lawn and cannot seem to buy enough or drink enough or sleep enough to fill this aching hollow. An insatiable and nagging hunger. It is not only those who lack bread who are hungry. We are mostly a people who are starving and tear blindly and the world trying to be filled. It is so difficult to find real sustenance. This makes me afraid.
Are we doomed to drift rootless, shape shifters in a landless land?

"This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, know or unknown, actual or visionary." Ed Abbey Desert Solitaire

I have read so may authors who speak of the necessity of becoming native to our landscapes, the necessity of community, the necessity of homecoming. I have read so many books about localized economies and sustainable agriculture that my mind is buzzing. I do not know which are my words and which belong to Wendell Berry, to Mary Oliver, to Wallace Stegner and Scott Russell Sanders. But then I realize that my voice is just one voice amongst many, a chorus dedicated to an idea of hope and sustainability. I despair each day but continue laughing, alive with possibility and hope. We do not have to live lives of quiet desperation. There are countless ways of becoming native. It is a boundless vision.

Community Supported Agriculture as a Place-Based Economy

I like to think of CSA’s as reservations—preservations really—monuments to the truth that there is an alternative way of living in the world, that this dominant culture of individualism, obsessive self-interest and ecological decay is neither inevitable nor necessary.

Last summer I was thrown into a community. I worked on a CSA farm because I wanted some hands-on experience with sustainable agriculture. But I was given much more. At Guidestone Farm I came to see how dependent we were on each other and on this small piece of land we cultivated. We needed each other, laughed and cried together, argued, danced. We had to work through all of our outside private affairs in this small and unprivate space; always bumping against one another. Those who speak of the ease of the proverbial community have certainly never lived in one. At times, community can be anything and everything but beautiful. And yet somehow I came to feel more known and accepted and free in the confines of community than any other situation in which I have lived.

Other intentional living communities bordered Guidestone CSA. A Seventh Day Adventist community on one side and the Emissaries of Divine Light on the other. We were all very different people. We had contrasting beliefs, lifestyles, rituals, rules, and diets. Yet necessity brought us together. The Adventists brought in their hay with our tractor and haying equipment in exchange for giving us enough hay to make up for our lack. We traded milk and eggs with the Emissaries in exchange for refrigerator space in their industrial kitchen before market days. We needed each other. There is a kind of love that comes from this need—which is a mutuality that is not oppressive, a sharing of gifts. This is an alternative to the isolation inherent in modern individualism. It is community and it liberates us to be fully who we are.

Economist Herman Daly writes about sustainable economics in a book called For the Common Good. He illuminates how our dominant economic theories are fundamentally flawed and suffer from “misplaced concreteness.” In particular Daly notes that we assume and promote individualism. The chief feature of homo economicus in economic theory is that no outside influences or relationships affect the individual. According to this assumption we are at our core, self-interested and self-serving. If this kind of understanding of human nature underlies our social and economic theory it is no wonder that we end up with policies that promote and perpetuate unsustainable and alienating realities.

CSA farm models offer an alternative paradigm that promotes connection to people and the land base that supports them. It is a system of ecological economics in which humans and the land community are in a relationship of mutuality. The practical manifestation of these theories is a consumer/producer association that provides OPPORTUNITY and demands RESPONSIBILITY. By working on or becoming a shareholder in a CSA farm one is entering into a contract that takes into consideration the land, the local community, and future generations. In a word—sustainability.

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam speaks of social decay in American society and how withdrawal from community life has led to a lack of reciprocity amongst citizens. Similarly, in American Democracy in Peril, William Hudson notes that individualism has a dark side and our society’s celebration of the autonomous individual has become a society of ISOLATED individuals. He mentions in particular “lifestyle enclaves,” exclusive neighborhoods that wall themselves away from society’s problems as a means of “solving” them. CSA communities combat these tendencies of the dominant paradigm by building communities of inclusivity.

CSA’s sell to people in their region. Members are invited to work on the farm, to visit, to share in the labor and hardship of agriculture as well as its rewards. There is no way to truly live in isolation in this world; we can only mask our connections to each other and to the land. CSA’s illuminate connection and interdependency by remembering that what we eat how we grow our food impacts our politics, our economics, international relations, justice and the health of the land. CSA farmers seek to feed the soil, to make agriculture creative and artistic—to make work joyful and the products of our labor nourishing and fulfilling. CSA relationships seek to relieve alienation by living in communion with people and with the land.

In his book Earth in Mind, David Orr describes how modern societies, and specifically institutions of higher learning, lack a sense of moral ecology—an awareness of our dependence. He notes that in our attempts to maximize self-interest we fail to notice that our actions move with resounding force to impact society, the biotic world, and our own spirits. CSA farming is intentional about nurturing moral ecology by willingly paying the full costs of things we produce and bearing the full consequences of our actions. It seeks to see dependence and respect it.

In most cases, without shareholders, CSA farmers could not afford to farm. This is not a career in which money is made and saved, it a lifestyle of choice and love and hardship. The farmer needs the shareholder. The farmer also needs healthy land—fertile soil, clean water and air. The shareholder needs food—nourishing fruits and vegetables and meats, free of pesticides and genetic engineering. The land and animals need gentle and knowing people in order to survive. CSA relationships illuminate dependence, nourish moral ecology. Relationships in the dominant society lack trust and love and friendship, expect little of people. CSA farming knows that members and producers have something greater than a monetary contract. There is more responsibility, more community, more rewards.

"This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes." Wes Jackson Becoming Native to this Place

There is much to say and much that has already been said about becoming native to our places. Much is theoretical, some is practical. What I know is that there is no right way to live in the world, but there are many ways that are wrong—we’ve come to know lots of these. When we destroy more that we create, when we pollute and divide and alienate, we are doing a great disservice to the energizing potential that we hold.

Becoming native to our places involves inner work and outer work. The inner work is spiritual; it is about maintaining a sense of humility and propriety in the way we interact with the natural world and the human community. It is an active process of self reflection and critical examination of who we are and how our actions impact the world around us. The outer work is a praxis of restoration and connection. We must do everything we do in light of interdependence and sustainability. We must do what we can to support local economies, maintain the health of local landscapes, and establish ourselves as people of community.

Being rooted is in our bones. I have witnessed students who come running out into the first warmth of a new spring. And I believe this celebration of place is a universal human experience. I have seen it with my own eyes and it makes me glad. It gives me hope despite all despairing. What is lacking is a societal and cultural acknowledgment of the value of being native. Landscape is burned into our memories like it is in all living creatures on this planet. It is a necessity. It is the only way we will survive. As a society we must nourish our nativity. This is what community supported agriculture attempts to do. CSA farming is a preservation of the truth that we can and must live life like it matters.

“Our nourishment is borrowed life. You need not be a Christian to feel, in a bite of bread, a sense of communion with the energy that courses through all things. The lump in your mouth is a chunk of earth; there is nothing else to eat.”

Scott Russell Sanders
The Common Life

"When eveything else has gone from my brain--the President's name, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family--when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that." Annie Dillard An American Childhood

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