With so much growing concern about food security, books like Sharing The Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture by Elizabeth Henderson and Robyn Van En, are important as examples of alternative food production systems. Community supported agriculture, or CSA, refers to individuals working together to produce food for harvest. Co-author Robyn Van En write that CSA is “food producers + food consumers + annual commitment to one another = CSA and untold possibilities”.
Much of the food grown in North America involves a broken food connection. Food comes from stores and restaurants and as Sharing The Harvest points out, our food has been “…washed, processed, packaged, maybe even irradiated, and transported long distances”. The growing disconnection from our food sources has resulted in poor health, environmental problems and a handful of multi-nationals having control of our food. Sharing The Harvest advocates for groups of like-minded individuals to come together to grow food for their community —for individuals to take back control of food quality, security and health.
Sharing The Harvest is the definitive guide to setting up a CSA with a good overview of why you should move away from a supermarket-based food culture and back to supporting local farming efforts. The increasing decline in North American farms is an alarming compromise for future food security. Sharing The Harvest reports that the 2002 Census of Agriculture found 21.5 million fewer acres in active farming than in 1997, an average loss rate of 4.2 million acres a year. In addition to the overall decrease in land for farming, careless industrial farming results in each farm acre losing an average of 7.7 tons of soil per acre, per year. Definitely time to return to living off the land.
Sharing The Harvest covers how to set up a CSA, formulate core principles, distribute labor, grow food, seed saving, dividing food shares, choosing land, hiring a farmer, nurturing interns, taking care of money matters, trouble shooting problems, and how to successfully implement a communications’ or PR plan for your CSA. It is not an over-statement to say everything you every wanted to know about CSAs is covered in Sharing The Harvest.
Order this book on Amazon.com Sharing The Harvest
Visit: http://www.chelseagreen.com/
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
303 Pages
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