Abstract
Community supported agriculture (CSA) serves as a platform for local producers, especially for small size farms, to sell fresh, local products directly to its members. CSA is an important approach to promote local economic growth and contribute to sustainable agriculture. Although CSA is widely accepted across the United States, the total number of CSA membership is still very low. It is important to determine the factors that affect the future development of CSA because of its social and environmental benefits. In this study, we analyze how the motivation, barriers, and methods of advertisement influence the participation dynamics of CSA by segmenting consumers based on their past, current, and future CSA participation. Based on a national survey with 795 responses, the results show that the younger generation, high-income families, and people who support sustainable agriculture are more likely to renew their CSA subscription. CSA members are found to be very sensitive to the time of food distribution, the price of products, and the location of CSA farms. Moreover, the impacts of perceived barriers of CSA participation and advertisement method vary based on respondents’ membership status. This paper sheds light on factors that influence various consumer groups and offers a more dynamic analysis of CSA consumer behavior. This analysis enhances understanding of CSA members’ preferences and could help CSA programs expand in the future and to better promote local food systems and sustainable agriculture.
Highlights
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is an important model of the alternative food networks (AFNs) and has been developed in response to concerns with industrial agriculture and to guarantee better control over food products [1,2,3]
Different from past studies that focus on the investigation of the factors that affect a current or a future CSA membership, the objective of this study is to further determine the important factors such as barriers, motivation, and source of information [17,27] that help regain CSA consumers if they stopped their membership in the past
Since many previous studies have only focused on the changes from one CSA membership status to another [18,26,27,28], in this study, we only focus on the two scenarios that have not been examined in the literature
Summary
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is an important model of the alternative food networks (AFNs) and has been developed in response to concerns with industrial agriculture and to guarantee better control over food products [1,2,3]. CSA programs encourage local production and consumption by allowing consumers to subscribe to a membership and, in return, receive food periodically from a group of local farmers during the harvest season [1]. This direct interaction with farmers offers consumers a chance to be involved in the decision-making of what products CSA farmers produce and how [4,5]. CSA is considered to generate less air pollution and to be more environmentally friendly than traditional agriculture that relies on long supply chains to deliver food from farms to consumers [5,8,17,18,19,20]. In addition to the direct benefits of CSA, CSA participation can increase the awareness of local farmers and establish direct connections with local farms [4,13,14,17,20,21]
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