I came to be an owner and manager of a community supported agriculture (CSA) program completely by accident. My husband, Andy, and his business partner, Greg, operated a small organic farm. All of their produce was sold each week through a network of more than 20 farmers’ markets that ring the San Francisco bay area.

In December of 1996 an enterprising young woman, Wendy Banzhaf, approached Greg and Andy with a business proposition. There’s a way of doing business called community supported agriculture, she said, where consumers pay in advance for weekly shares of a farmer’s harvest. She liked the quality and variety of vegetables that she saw displayed at our farmers’ market stands and thought that she could create a CSA program for our farm that could serve the Santa Cruz and San Jose area. Greg and Andy knew nothing about community supported agriculture but they knew their business plan, which relied only on farmers’ market sales for income, was flawed. They were attracted by the CSA idea as Wendy outlined it because it offered the farm another way of earning income and promised them a more stable cash flow.

Wendy spent three months doing a tremendous amount of research about how successful CSA programs functioned. She began with 30 subscribers and two bosses in May of 1997. Wendy had to learn from the bottom up how to run a new style of small business with an unusual business plan. Her chores ranged from formatting a newsletter and making up the share boxes from the farm harvest to marketing the new CSA concept to both the public and the press. That first year Wendy succeeded in signing up 150 shareholders while negotiating the steep start-up learning curve and trying to reconcile the ample but often conflicting “input” from Andy and Greg. I was no more than an interested onlooker. While I was a perfect example of a target customer I had given birth to our daughter, Lena, in February, and our son, Graydon, was three years old.

Because it is possible to grow vegetable crops all year around here along California’s central coast, and because the farm was struggling financially, Greg and Andy decided to push the CSA delivery program through the winter. That effort was a failure. We experienced months of pounding rain. California was undergoing one of its occasional bouts with “El Niño,” the aberrant warm oceanic current that pushes up from Peru and Ecuador and sends storm after storm spinning onshore. The farm was flooded, the farmers markets were washed out week after week and Greg and Andy’s cash flow went down the drain. They split their business partnership up and Wendy, Andy and myself continue the CSA alone.

The second season of our CSA program was a nightmare. The farm had spent the money Wendy had taken in the previous fall but the crops had been ruined in the rain. The harvest crew had been paid to harvest crops that went unsold in rain-swept farmers’ markets. Andy and I had to spend our savings to fulfill the obligations we had taken on with each subscription. Shareholders were discouraged with the steady diet of the chards, kales, cabbages and leeks that could survive the winter mud. Many folks quit. To avoid going broke we had to let Wendy go and substantially adjust the scale of our ambition. With an infant in one arm and a 3-year-old pulling on my leg, I went to work as a CSA coordinator farm wife.

Before our children were born I had always worked as a kindergarten teacher. Apart from doing weekend farmers’ markets for Greg and Andy I had never worked on a farm. Now I had to run the business while Andy did the farming. I brought a school teacher’s attention to detail and more than 10 years of amateur computer skills to my new job. It didn’t hurt that I have a very dear friend, John, who wrote a custom database program for our CSA that took into account all the complexities and issues that I found myself facing. John treated me as a “beta site” to work out the kinks in his software and held my hand through all sorts of computer problems. We paid him in vegetables which was nice because we had a lot more vegetables than money and he appreciated the freshness of the produce. Another old friend, Carol, was essential in putting together a website for us. The website proved invaluable since a lot of potential customers were able to inform themselves before they called me on the phone. Uninterested people went no further but the interested folks had fewer questions and my office time was spent in a more efficient manner than before. Looking back on that year it is clear that John and Carol’s computer help saved us but it was their moral support and that of our core CSA subscribers that kept us going forward.

Growth brings success
Over the last three and a half years since I took over the management of our CSA it has grown from being a money drain to providing a modest income and from 150 shareholders to over 300. We have gone from experimental efforts fueled by cash and enthusiasm to practices and policies that have been defined by experience. One of the nicest developments has been the opportunity to get to know other families in our area that have CSA farms and to compare notes. With several million consumers in our back yard we don’t regard each other as competition. The big chain stores that only buy from the big farms are the real competition. Our neighbors, with their own little struggling farms and their own kids pulling on their pants legs are the closest people we have to a peer group. They are our friends and our CSA’s operating policies have often been informed through conversations with them.

We no longer attempt to run our subscription program all year long. From late March to Thanksgiving we feel that we can offer a variety of produce and a degree of freshness that the big stores have difficulty matching. Not only that, by stopping for a few months we give ourselves a break and our customers have a chance to file back into the chains for a reality check. Winter sees the oldest, most beat-up produce on the supermarket shelves that has traveled the greatest distance. By February our shareholders are on the phone demanding that we start up operations.

During the winter we keep in touch with our subscribers through a monthly letter. To reduce postage costs we have as many CSA members receive an e-mail newsletter as possible. During the season our newsletter has taken on more importance than it did at first, too. We put out a double-sided newsletter and always try to add interesting tidbits about food history or other farming issues. We also give out many recipes and I often repeat popular recipes. Our newsletter is online and we’ve found that when subscribers enjoy it, they forward it along to their friends and we often pick up new CSA members without trying. Our newsletters have been so popular that we have email subscribers scattered all over the US and we’ve even introduced a seasonal hardcopy journal, Roots, that helps in publicizing our farm’s CSA. To stay in touch with our shareholders we also plan a few kid-friendly and farmer-friendly CSA days on the farm. We are only available for 2 hours, and folks are welcome to stop by, so things don’t become too stressful for us. We’ve also had a couple of very successful potlucks. We start off the year with an open house where all people are welcome as a way to introduce our program to new people. A strawberry U-pick day is appealing to families with kids. A tomato U-pick day satisfies the folks who can. October is U-Pick pumpkin month so families can come and get a pumpkin that would be too much work to deliver.
Because we want all of our subscribers to be happy we start everyone off with a four-week trial share before expecting them to pay for 10 week blocks of deliveries. We’ve found that the biggest reason that people drop out of our CSA is that prior to receiving a weekly box of produce they weren’t really aware of how little they cooked. If they don’t feel resentful about receiving something they don’t use they are often so pleased at the freshness of the product that they’ll pass our name along even if they are dropping the service because it doesn’t work for them. We offer folks who subscribe for the whole season a 4% discount. The pick-up site hosts whose generosity in donating a place to leave our boxes make all of this possible receive a 25% discount.

After initially attempting to do home deliveries for an extra fee we’ve given up. It was a very popular service but there was no way we could afford all the extra driving around. We only deliver along a fixed route that makes sense to us and our customers. Because our cities are typically gridlocked with traffic jams we look for pick-up sites that are centrally located but off of main thoroughfares so that our shareholders don’t have to fight traffic to get to their boxes. In this way going to get a box from Mariquita Farm may be even easier than the bumper car competitions shareholders encounter in the parking lots of our big chain competitors.

From the beginning of our delivery season to the end we take no vacations, and neither do our shareholders. We used to suspend deliveries for absent shareholders but trying to be responsive to everyone’s shifting vacation priorities made for a bookkeeping snarl back at our office. Now we ask that shareholders who aren’t going to be able to pick up their box allow us to donate it to charity if they can’t find a friend to pick it up for them. Often our shareholders do get a friend to use the produce and when the shareholder comes back from vacation the friend will call us and sign up too.

We can’t grow everything that our customers are going to want and we no longer try. People love fruit but we only grow strawberries. Over the years we have developed successful relationships with several neighboring organic orchards and we’ve had organic cherries, apricots and apples for our shareholders every season. Sometimes Andy will bring in organic vegetables too, if our own products are not varied enough. Two local CSA farms sell to us when we are short and we return the favor. We never buy in more than 10% of any share box, all purchased product is organic and we only buy from personal friends so that we can be assured the product is organic and fresh. Andy’s former partner Greg is a favorite farmer when our own fields are light. Having a broad spectrum of vegetables in every box helps us retain shareholders because we can always compose a mix of foods that are user friendly and compatible.

Community does offer support
Looking back over the five years of experience that we have had with the CSA it is clear that the community supported agriculture ideal has lived up to its promise; our farm has truly been supported by our community of subscribers, even if at times we were only on life support. We are not getting rich doing this, but then again no one ever promised us that we would. Whenever we get to the point that we want to scream and throw up our hands we are calmed down by the gratitude of our shareholders. Our CSA program needs to perform better financially but I keep refining it and it keeps getting just a little bit easier. Maybe in a few years I can write an update that tells you how we’ve improved our program even more. In farming nothing stays the same.

Mariquita Farm
Organically Grown Vegetables, Berries and Herbs
P.O. Box 2065, Watsonville, CA 95077
831-761-3226
http://www.mariquita.com
http://www.rootjournal.com