Community Supported Agriculture for the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont
USA - CSA Growth
January 28, 2010
This past summer, word came out that Sunrise is a larger-than-average CSA farm by Vermont standards. This surprised me, since I think of us as a sleepy, neighborhood-scale operation. Now word comes out from Local Harvest, a national group that tracks these things, that we’re larger-than-average by nationwide standards, too. Wow! Far from making me despair that we might have inadvertently crossed the line into industrial-scale agriculture, I take delight in how many small-timers are out there doing their thing.
For those of you numbers types, here’s the digest from the Local Harvest newsletter:
Earlier this month we participated in a workshop about the future of CSA at the EcoFarm Conference in Pacific Grove, CA. Putting together our presentation gave us the opportunity to dig deep into our CSA database and pull out some numbers we found quite interesting. Like: the average sized CSA in the U.S. has 96 members, but the mean is 47. If it’s been a while since statistics class, that means that half of all CSAs have more than 47 members, and half have fewer. There are a lot of small CSAs out there! What we notice from talking with a lot of CSA farmers is that many people start small with their CSA and then increase the number of shares they offer — sometimes quite rapidly — once their systems are in place and tested. From our vantage point, both the slow and careful start and the eventual growth are important elements of the economic viability of the model.
For those who like numbers, here are a few more. Of the 3,229 CSAs listed with Local Harvest, we have ‘size’ data for 2766. Of those, 2,202 have 100 or fewer shareholders, another 504 offer 101 - 500 shares, and finally, 60 farms have more than 500 CSA members. Extrapolating from those numbers, we see that CSAs of 100 shareholders or less serve 25% of all CSA members in the country. Those in the 101 - 500 braket serve 52% of CSA members, and large CSAs of 500 or more supply 23% of all subscribers.
To put this in context, the total number of shares offered by our CSAs is about 390,000. That number represents one-half of one percent (0.5%) of all households in the U.S. That might not sound like a lot, but when we mapped out the growth curve, it was impressive! If the number of CSAs keeps growing at the same rate as CSAs have been joining our site over the last three years, by 2020, there will be over 18,000 CSAs in the U.S.
—Chuck