COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE

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Children in some families began asking if the vegetables at the dinner table were from Barbara and Kerry—and refusing to eat them if they weren't! Still, there was clearly some consumer adjustment involved in learning to eat produce in season instead of just picking by fancy from endless choices in a supermarket. As Kerry points out, "Some people didn't understand why they were getting beet greens before they got beets.

" Should ice, however, maintains that most members realized that "eating in season requires an adjustment in mentality" and made appropriate dietary changes. "With this project, people felt `That's our garden, our food.' They didn't pick up their shares, then sneak out to the Acme supermarket." Furthermore, unless a family was committed to preserving food, many of them actually found themselves with more vegetables than they could eat. The acid test of member satisfaction, of course, is renewal, and almost all the participants in the Kimberton CSA signed up for a second year. In addition, new members bumped the total number of shareholders up to 100. To cope with the too-much-food problem, the size of a share was halved from the year before.

And to cover a slight increase in expenses, that share cost $320 (the previous cost for the same amount of food was $300 at the beginning of the year with $10 added on at the end of the season to cover the gardeners' Social Security tax). Actually, not every member pays the same amount per share. "A childless two career couple can afford to pay more than a single parent family, and we wanted both to be able to be members," Rod notes.

"So when we had our February membership meeting, we told people they could pay from $270 to $370 for a share, as long as the total averaged out to $320. Everyone wrote down the price they wanted to pay, then someone gathered up the papers, went in another room and tallied it all up. It turned out we were short an average of $5 a share, so we passed the papers back out for another go-round. This time, we ended up with a surplus of $10 a share!"

The Kimberton CSA also wanted to create some mechanism for sharing the harvest according to need. "A New Hampshire CSA we know about simply lets its members come and take what they want," says Rod. "Initially, some people in that group were worried that the early birds would get all the good vegetables. But the opposite happened instead there was food left over at the end of the day. They had to get volunteers to push the produce on people. "Our group wasn't willing to go the route of complete free choice, though, so we chos a middle ground. A sign in the distribution shed on pickup day tells how much of each crop you're entitled to take. If you don't want all of it, you can put the extra on a surplus table. Anybody can take what they want from that."

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