The Power of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): A Good Life for Small Farmers and Small Villages

Text / Da Wang

Small organic farmers are the guardians of the land and of people

In Taiwan, China, most farmers farm as smallholders. Small organic farmers, awakened by concerns about food safety and a desire to protect the land, have begun switching to organic cultivation.

Most of the ones I know are endowed with a natural way of thinking and live lives of conscious freedom, free from coercion. Their lives are simple, their needs easily met; they work their fields in step with the seasons and the rhythms of nature, without chasing profit or maximum yields.

Over the past few years, living in the countryside, I have observed the lives of small organic farmers up close, and I have come to understand more and more that "we need them even more than they need us." On their farms, you will not see living things and land ravaged by chemical agents. Nor are they like large organic farms, which over-cultivate vast quantities of a single crop, so that the fields suit only a few species, with few frogs or birds.

Natural systems lend a hand. To keep production stable, they usually have to rely on more resources, equipment and technology to control pests and diseases. Things like laying canvas to suppress weeds, building greenhouses to keep out insects, and using pheromone lures and Bacillus thuringiensis for biological control over-protect the crops. Small organic farmers plant diverse crops so that all kinds of living things have a place to live. Through natural selection, where the weak are culled and the strong survive, their food is healthier, and their way of treating the land is friendlier. They are the most important group guarding humanity and the earth.

Who has trapped the small organic farmers?

Small organic farmers often rack their brains over selling their harvests, and agonize over unstable income and whether to keep going. But what exactly is trapping them?

One threshold everyone knows is the trust dilemma of "organic certification." Because they have little capital and small harvests, an annual certification fee of tens of thousands of yuan is out of proportion to their income, and the cost is hard to recover; but without organic certification, consumers will not trust you, and distributors will not come looking for you.

There is an even higher second threshold: the distribution dilemma of "big can't help small." Even if you pass organic certification, distributors may not necessarily work with you. The current distribution market is dominated by a few large corporate distributors. Small farmers have small yields, so by rights big distributors should easily be able to help sell their produce. So why can't big help small?

This sounds quite paradoxical, but a simple example makes it clear. If you are a big distributor needing 500 kilograms of corn, would you buy from 5 small farmers each producing 100 kilograms? Or would you find a large farmer producing 600 kilograms? Working with small farmers raises the costs and risks of delivery, communication and quality control.

For big distributors to survive, choosing big farmers is the right thing to do. Big distributors supporting big farms is a matter of mutual need, and perfectly natural.

This is a kind of structural market failure. In the market, small distributors with "matched needs" are simply too rare, and it is very hard for small farmers to find small distributors to work with. We cannot always blame big distributors for lacking ideals; instead we should think carefully about why small distributors cannot grow.

Discovering the magic of CSA: a cooperative economy that starts with the food industry

The CSA operation run by the vegetable shop now feels relatively stable. A stable consumer base, supporting small farmers steadily over the long term - this force is expanding. What is being supported is not only small farmers, and what is being consumed is not only food.

We contract-farm soybeans with small farmers and hand them to young craftspeople to make tofu and other soy products; we have begun working with small farmers to grow wheat and letting handmade noodle masters make bread and noodles for us; we work with tea-growing communities and, besides pressing oil, turn the leftover bitter tea powder into household soap. There are also all kinds of mothers who make pickles and jams, making preserved vegetables, dried radish, kumquat jam and so on for us. This not only stabilizes farmers' incomes but also supports skilled handmade craftspeople, keeping the processing profits in the countryside.

This kind of small-scale mutual cooperation among grassroots producers is in fact a typical "cooperative economy," and it is very well suited to development in rural areas. Because in the countryside, the vast majority are precisely this kind of small producer.

The vegetable shop is a group of people striving hard for a good life, especially handmade goods and organic farming, and a life and possessions that do not depend on petroleum.

Many people are interested in how we live locally, and often come to see us, hoping to learn these good ways of living. So we designed it into a small "good local life" tour, letting people learn to make tofu by hand, make bread, and also learn to build handmade bread ovens, do handmade woodwork and make all kinds of natural tableware; learning to live the good life of the countryside.

These small tours continuously bring groups of friends, who stay in local homestays. In this way, the community mothers who can make dried radish, the girl who makes bread, the young craftsperson skilled at handmade wooden tableware, the homestay owner who lives well and loves making friends... anyone connected to good food, with good handiwork, who knows how to live, can all be supported by this CSA to live the life they want to live.

A small local CSA can start from distributing food in the food industry, and link together farm experience, handmade learning, travel and lodging, learning about local life, and so on, opening up endless possibilities for a cooperative economy in the countryside. This truly astonishes me.

"What else can this CSA do for the countryside?" Once I discovered the magic of CSA, I could not help but become curious.

In recent years, incidents that damage rural areas have arisen on all sides, awakening in us a more urgent need to do one thing: let more people come to live in the countryside. People will surely protect the living habitat that belongs to them - that is how I think of it.

So we used the vegetable shop's resources to establish the "Farming Method School." In the school, the vegetable shop provides a clean plot of land, and farmers skilled in natural farming serve as leaders, letting young people who wish to return to the countryside focus on learning to farm, and learning to truly become food producers. A half-year of farming life in the countryside gives them a chance to put down roots, to see whether they are truly suited to becoming farmers, and then, to settle down.

After they return to farming, the vegetable shop provides the needed funding and distribution cooperation, supporting each of them to take over another piece of fertile farmland. Now, a group of new farmers has learned to grow crops, taken over several jia of land, and begun to care about the surrounding water sources, about possible development, about everything connected to them - far beyond those several jia of land.

Through CSA we quietly launched a movement to occupy land. Some friends joke that we are increasingly neglecting our proper business.

We do not know how much more magic a CSA can work. But we do know that we must work its magic with all our strength, so that the small farmers, and the people in the villages, can all live a good life together.

Further reading
Da Wang Vegetable Shop
October, Hualien - Four conversations about caring for the land and promoting a good life