Support Local CSAs Because 'Good Food is the Best Health Insurance'

Eating locally grown food benefits everyone by supporting not only local farmers but the local economy as well.  But eating local often isn’t as easy as picking up conventionally grown groceries at the nearby box store.  What if there were a convenient way to obtain local meats and produce?  Enter the CSA model.

Vegetables grow both in the field and
hoophouse at Pinehold Gardens in Oak Creek

 CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  Begun in the mid-1980s, CSAs started with a vision of sharing both the risks and benefits of farming with the farms’ customers.  The original idea still lives on—shareholders pay one flat rate to the farmer, usually before the season begins, then receive a box of homegrown farm products on a regular basis throughout the growing season.  While until recently produce CSAs have been the norm, you can now find farmers offering other products through the CSA model.  

At Morning Star Family Farm in Hartford, Wisconsin, we offer a Meat CSA, providing our customers with a monthly mixed box of our own organic-fed, pasture-raised meats.  With several pickup locations in the greater Milwaukee area, it is a great way to enjoy a variety of our tasty products.

Multi-species grazing at Morning Star Family Farm
decreases pest problems and
increases the productivity of the pasture

According to David Kozlowski of Pinehold Gardens, a farm in Oak Creek that has offered a produce CSA since 1995, “CSAs help reconnect families with the food they need and want.  It is fresher and tastier, but it is also healthier.  Good food is the best health insurance.”

Other benefits to the customer include getting first dibs on the best of the produce from the farm.  Those freshly picked veggies or frozen meats are delivered to one or more urban locations making pickup a breeze.  Customers get a taste of all of the offerings of a local farm without needing to carve out time to attend a farmers’ market or drive to a local coop.

Tomatoes growing at Pinehold Gardens
in Oak Creek, Wisconsin

Of course, the farmer benefits, too.  The cash flow from selling shares before the season starts allows him to buy feed, seeds, and soil amendments, make equipment repairs, and so on.  Kozlowski adds, “It is a sustainable business model for farms, helping farms weather circumstances that would otherwise drive them out of farming.”  

Looking to provide our customers with the ultimate in local home cooking, Morning Star Family Farm has recently teamed up with Pinehold Gardens to offer a weekly Produce CSA box and a monthly Meat CSA box, available for pickup in Oak Creek beginning in July 2015.  Signups have already begun and will continue until the shares are sold out.  You can learn more about Pinehold Gardens’ Produce CSA at their website, www.pineholdgardens.com.  More information about our Meat CSA can be found at www.morningstarfamilyfarm.net/meat-csa.html.  

A typical August Produce CSA box 
from Pinehold Gardens

Either way you will find what Kozlowski says is true, “When you belong to a CSA, you have committed to not only helping to build an important local foodshed by supporting small local farms, but you have made the decision to control the freshness, quality, and taste of the food you and your family eats.”