Retaining Members of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in California for Economic Sustainability: What Characteristics Affect Retention Rates?

Ryan E Galt,Julia Van Soelen Kim,Libby O Christensen,Kate Munden-Dixon,Katharine Bradley

doi:10.3390/su11092489

Abstract

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is one response to major ecological and social problems in the conventional agrifood system. Here we are concerned with how CSA management can enhance the economic sustainability of CSAs. More specifically, using a survey of 111 CSA farms in California, we analyze how specific variables in five domains—CSA management characteristics, farmer characteristics, farm characteristics, economic characteristics, and region—influence retention rates (the proportion of CSA members continuing from one year to the next). Our analysis involves first conducting bivariate correlations, then building a simple causal model that theorizes the direction of causation, then constructing a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) multiple regression models to hold constant independent variables. Our discussion draws out recommendations from our findings for CSA farmers and organizations that support CSA, including increasing the length of the season, increasing crop type diversity, including fruit in standard shares, bringing farming practices into line with organic standards, working with other CSAs to reduce inter-CSA competition, and changing marketing regions for farms in certain regions that appear to be highly saturated. We conclude by identifying more collective routes that CSAs can take to cultivate “CSA people” for a more sustainable economic dimension of CSAs in the long term.

Highlights

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is one response to major ecological and social problems in the conventional agrifood system
40% of the CSAs were above the cutoff for success (75% retention rate) mentioned by Docter and Hildebrand [24]
We examined the relationship between retention rates and CSA farm locations within a region, and the region that farmers identified as their primary market region

Summary

Introduction

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is one response to major ecological and social problems in the conventional agrifood system. By depending on largely renewable agricultural inputs and shortening the supply chain greatly, most CSAs attempt to enhance the ecological sustainability of the agrifood system by socially-embedding production and consumption [1,2,3]. A recent large survey of Midwestern farmers practicing direct marketing has shown that farms with CSAs are practicing the most ecologically sustainable form of agriculture [3]. While this strong ecological commitment exists amongst CSA farmers in other places [5] and, appears to be an essential characteristic of CSA, the sustainability of the economic dimension of CSA faces serious challenges. An important question is how managers of CSAs can respond, individually and collectively, to these challenges and enhance the economic sustainability of CSA

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Discussion

Conclusion