Yesterday I ran across an interesting article on CSA's (Community Supported Agriculture) and the normal risks involved with farming in general. The article is titled, "When things go very wrong: Community Supported Agriculture and shared risk", and is the cover article on the New Farm website. I thought it was a pretty interesting article detailing some of the risks involved in CSA's and market garden farming. The idea is where does the "community support" come into the CSA? CSA's are supposed to spread the risk out for the farmer by bringing in some money up front. But, what happens when disaster strikes at the farm?That is a good question to ponder and there are probably lots of thoughts that could be kicked around. Many of the CSA farmers mentioned in the article said they didn't really pass on all of the "risk" to their customers and did buy in food or refund money if there was something like a late frost or flood. But, that isn't really what got me thinking after I read the article.
What got me thinking was the idea of a beef/pork/poultry/etc. based CSA. I know these exist in some places and there are something that I would be interested in learning more about. But, the main reason they interest me is the idea of spreading out the risk (and I don't know how I really feel about that from a business standpoint). How would it work for people to buy shares of a beeve or pig? What would sharing the risk look like in that case?
Of course if you were going to give people a weekly subscription of meat then you would need plenty of storage of prepared cuts. On the positive I suppose you could do a better job of distributing all of the cuts and ground meat. Maybe...
So, what are your thoughts on meat/livestock CSA's or CSA's in general? I would love to hear what everyone thinks!
