Since 1986, when two small farms in Western Massachusetts began selling shares in what came to be known as community-supported agriculture, farms across the U.S. have encouraged consumers to invest at the beginning of the season for a guaranteed weekly return in vegetable dividends. According to LocalHarvest, CSAs now connect consumers directly with more than 2,000 local farmers.
But community-supported food doesn’t just mean lettuce, arugula, and potatoes anymore. There are cooks selling shares in restaurants before the first pot of water ever boils. Dairy farmers sell ownership in cows to get around prohibitions on the sale of raw milk. Others have created so-called “cowpools” to divvy up an entire animal and dole out cuts of meat. And fishermen have begun selling shares in seafood stock.
With a faltering economy, some say local foods are an investment opportunity with a tangible return—a share in both the risks and the bounty of farming, fishing, or running a restaurant.
A restaurant counting on its regulars
Sharon Deitz opened The Bee’s Knees, a small restaurant in Morrisville, Vermont, five years ago; soon she was carrying 60 and 70 dinners down the stairs from her apartment’s tiny kitchen to the restaurant below. When she started to burn out and didn’t have the capital to renovate, she began showing the restaurant to prospective buyers. But a group of regulars stepped in and told her, “Hey, we’ll help you out.”
Now she’s renovating the place using the nearly $70,000 she’s raised by selling community-supported restaurant certificates: Customers make investments in her business and get discounts in return. A $1,000 investment buys 12 certificates, each redeemable for $90 worth of food and beverages over the course of three months; $500 gets you $45 in meals per quarter. Deitz also sold $400 punch cards for draft beers and coffees; and investors who made unsecured $5,000 loans get repaid in five years, with a 4 percent return and a 10 percent discount on food (a financing plan she modeled after the Bobcat Café in Bristol, VT).
Ten miles from The Bee’s Knees, another restaurant, Claire’s in Hardwick, has partially financed its startup operation by selling community shares.
“It’s kind of this litmus test,” Deitz says. “If people said, ‘We’ll support you,’ but nobody was willing to risk their money here, I doubt if this place would be sustainable. But because so many people have trusted me with their money, even with current economy, I think that we’re going to be okay.”
Raw milk without the red tape: Cow-sharing in Colorado
The Weston A. Price Foundation estimates that about 5 percent of Americans drink raw milk. Despite consumer demand, many states have adopted versions of the federal Food and Drug Administration’s Grade “A” Pasteurized Milk Ordinance (PMO), which essentially bans sending raw milk for human consumption anywhere but the dairy processing plant for pasteurization.
Still, farmers and activists have used cow-share or cow-leasing agreements to skirt state-level prohibitions against raw milk distribution. “It’s a real consumer right to choose,” says David Lynch, of Buena Vista, Colorado’s Cottonwood Creek Dairy, which has five milking Jersey cows in a 70-share program that delivers a gallon of raw milk a week to subscribers.
In 2005, after a multiyear fight to legitimize a raw milk share program, Lynch watched the state legislature pass a law allowing residents to buy milk if they have a stake (“undivided interest”) in a dairy herd. Shareholders at his farm, for example, buy a share in the milking herd for a $50 reimbursable fee, and pay $35 a month for a gallon of fresh milk a week. “It’s a privatized system,” he says. “You can only get raw milk from the farmer.”
While the FDA says there’s a risk of bacterial infections associated with drinking raw milk, 32 dairy farmers in Colorado offer raw milk shares, regulated by an association of producers who set their own standards. “In my mind, this is exactly what we were hoping to see,” Lynch says. “When something is true and accurate and right, it will win out.”
Cowpooling, or how to share steaks and burgers
One of the few, if not the only, farmer-run meat-only CSAs in the country is helmed by Aidan Davin and Kate Stillman, who raise livestock—pigs, chickens, cows, and sheep—at Stillman’s at The Turkey Farm in Hartwick, Massachusetts. They bring frozen meats to farmers markets and also sell meat shares to about 150 members at drop-off sites outside of Boston.
“We just raise enough animals that make sure that everybody gets the same thing—usually half ground and stew and half chops and steaks of pork and beef and whole chickens,” Davin says. “They just get what we give them.” For customers with religious reasons for eschewing pork, they offer a couple of shares without it.
Other farmers raising specialty meats, like pasture-fed beef, say it’s difficult to deliver equitable shares of fresh meat at regular intervals. In colder climates, where animals tend to be slaughtered in the fall (often at slaughterhouses hundreds of miles away), the shares may be delivered only once a year—and if one shareholder receives a filet mignon while another gets tongue, there’s a problem. But divvying up all the cuts of beef into equal portions “would be like trying to divide up a leek,” says Tamar Adler, who cooks at Chez Panisse Café and runs the Bay Area Meat CSA.
So while organizers say that farmer-run meat shares don’t appear readily available, “cowpooling,” or creating a customer-run clubs that agree in advance to buy whole animals, could offer some of the benefits of a CSA.
“What you can do is find a producer to drop off at a specific location every two weeks and or every month,” says Jo Robinson, a journalist who runs Eat Wild, an informational website about grass-fed meat. “A lot of them will say yes because that’s a very effective and lucrative way to get food out to the public.”
CSAs head out to sea
In Sitka, Alaska, salmon troller Eric Jordan says his highest-value catch goes to the Alaska Marine Conservation Council’s Catch of the Season program. The nonprofit delivers annual shares of wild-caught seafood to donors contributing upwards of $700. “It’s a tangible way to connect support of marine conservation with the resource,” says the organization’s director, Eric Siy.
Other fishermen say they hope the CSA model will foster awareness of depleted oceans and faltering coastal economies—in addition to offering seafood that’s often less than 24 hours out of the water.
In Maine, the Port Clyde Fresh Catch fishermen’s cooperative distributes a portion of its catch to church groups whose members have paid in advance. The arrangement gives fishermen a better price per pound, and the cash advance goes toward fuel for trips, as well as expensive vessel and gear repairs. The winter share costs $189 for 14 weeks of ten-pound shares of succulent Maine shrimp; in the summer, a 12-week subscription costs $360 for 8-12 pounds per week of whole, head-on fish.
“We want a high-quality product that we own from dock to plate,” says Kim Libby, the co-op’s manager. “It’s a grassroots effort.”
A Community-Supported Market
In Boston’s rapidly developing South End, an expansion of Lionette’s Market is in the works, and proprietor Jamey Lionette hopes to solicit financial help from loyal customers, whose investments will not only yield a stipend at the store but will also preserve his family’s five-year-old market and café.
“People in the neighborhood want their neighborhood to stay a certain way,” he says. That includes having a corner market where they can shop for grass-fed beef, produce, and cheeses that (unlike those at major supermarket chains) hail almost exclusively from regional farms around New England, New York, and Quebec.
Under Lionette’s plan, a $10,000 investment would give a $125 weekly return for two years (or $13,000 worth of food); $5,000 would yield a $55 weekly stipend; and $2,500 would give investors 10 percent off store items for two years.
Lionette says his reasoning for going direct to his friends and neighbors was pretty simple: “There’s a real bad economy and I already have one small loan.” And the concept of seeing tangible—and edible—evidence of an investment was nothing new to savvy consumers looking for local foods, Lionette says. “The CSA is obviously where I stole the idea from.”