Setbacks open options

We've suffered a setback in our efforts to create a community garden in Monroe when we lost the Rochelle and Marx Street sites, but that simply opens our minds to other options. There is no end to this process. We can no longer afford to assume a mechanism to produce food locally cannot be found or created.

In 1986, a group of people in Massachusetts -- pioneers in the local food movement -- sat down and formed a community supported farm model. From that first farm, more than 1,700 others have sprouted. They all start from a single goal ... to create a dramatic increase in affordable locally produced fruits and vegetables ... and followed different paths to that goal. Some worked and some failed, but the goal has remained healthy. And, now with the stratospheric rising cost of transportation (it may never come down), concerns about where our food supply comes from, and what has been done to it, community supported agriculture is more important than ever.

Steven McFadden, writing for the Rodale Institute, takes a look at the 20th century history of the CSA movement in this two-part series of articles.