Creating A Market

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Core groups are particularly useful if you have a fairly distant off-farm delivery location and don't know potential members or distribution sites. Says Debby Kavakos, "We were wary of entrusting some critical jobs to people we barely knew 200 miles away. But we couldn't have started our New York City CSA membership without a core group, and now some of those people have become good friends." Not all CSA farms have core groups, however, either because the growers prefer to handle the aforementioned duties themselves, or because there are not enough members interested in serving on a core group.

If you want a core group to become part of your CSA operation, look for people to perform specific tasks such as managing the distribution site for the duration of a season. Let them know what type of work is involved (lots of greeting people), how much time it will take (four hours per week), when it needs to be done (Tuesdays, between 3:00 P.m. and 7:00 P.m.), and what, if anything, they will receive in return (lots of gratitude and satisfaction). Sometimes, farmers provide a share or partial share in exchange for the work a core group member does.

Communication with Your Members

Perhaps the single most important thing you can provide for your members besides delicious produce is a weekly letter from the farm. This may sound like a lot of work, but it need not take more than ten or 15 minutes per week, and it's crucial for building members' understanding of your project and loyalty to it.

"Last year was a fairly hard year on our farm," says Sarah Shapiro, field manager at Quail Hill Community Farm (a project of the Peconic Land Trust) on the eastern tip of Long Island. "We had maybe five newsletters from the farm all year. This year, a member edited a weekly sheet that included news from the field, information about farm events and a column from a different farm staff person each week. It's great fun, it's made a tremendous difference, and has really helped with communication and increased member satisfaction."

For the most part, your members will know very little about just how difficult and exciting it is to grow food on a commercial scale. A photocopied one-page or even half-page handwritten note discussing one aspect of the farm experience that week, the weather and its effect on the crops, an unusual vegetable in the share, the weather, a recently-hired worker, the weather, a new piece of equipment, the weather, a plague of flea beetles, the weather, a sauerkraut-making experiment, and ...the weather will deeply increase members' connection with you and their willingness to support the farm through adversity.

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