Community Supported Agriculture: it’s a concept that’s been catching on across the country for some time. Customers purchase an early spring subscription from their local farm or food hub in order to receive bags of fresh, local, and organic produce weekly throughout the growing season. Why has it gotten so popular? Farmers love CSA because upfront spring payments can provide financial stability and reliability for the rest of their season. Customers buy in partly due to the rise in “eat local” and “eat organic” movements, and partly because it can be cheaper or more convenient than other produce purchasing options. But there’s an organization in Maine with a new take on the trend – at Fresh Start Farms works to ensure that it’s not just that the community supports agriculture. The program works to help agriculture support the community.
Fresh Start Farms is a farmer training program designed to help refugee farmers from Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and South Sudan transition to a new life in the US agricultural climate. Fresh Start’s New American farmers are each given a plot on a collective farm located in the rural outskirts of Lisbon, Maine. There, they learn how to operate a farm in the United States from both an agricultural and business perspective. The farmers are encouraged to grow some of their favorite crops from back home, tapping into the niche market of their fellow refugees, who are unable to find certain crops elsewhere. They sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and food pantries in the region, and directly to customers through farmers markets and the Fresh Start Farms CSA. In the off season, farmers take classes on topics like business strategy, crop planning, and marketing.
Anna Tracht, the CSA manager for Fresh Start Farms, divides their CSA customer base into two main groups: fellow refugees, and Portland urbanites. To fellow refugees, the program offers a unique opportunity to purchase culturally relevant produce at affordable prices that support their community. Fresh Start offers flexible payment plans and even a limited number of subsidized CSA memberships for members of the refugee community who can’t afford to pay the subscription.
In a recent survey, the office workers who purchase Fresh Start Farms CSAs nearly unanimously told Anna that they purchase because they “identify with the mission” of Fresh Start Farms. Living in the liberal city of Portland, these customers could afford to purchase local and organic produce elsewhere, but they choose Fresh Start Farms because of its social justice mission. Fresh Start’s partner organization, Cultivating Community, has done a great job of spreading the word about food justice in Portland, and customers can’t wait to use their grocery spending to “support refugee farmers.”
Fresh Start Farms is clearly doing some groundbreaking work promoting social justice and food security across multiple communities. But Anna admits there is one important customer base the program has failed to win over thus far. “We aren’t getting the same buy in from customers in Lisbon.” That is troublesome, since that is where Fresh Start Farms is based.
Why? It’s complicated. Anna explains, there’s a “really interesting dynamic of farming in a very very red rural town, but working with refugee farmers, and selling mostly to urban customers.”
While Fresh Start does sell produce to the local food pantry as part of their wholesale program, Anna has struggled to get even a few CSA customers in the Lisbon area. Some town members are hostile towards the farm and don’t identify with its mission. Without an organization like Cultivating Community starting local conversations about food justice, it’s harder to get the community behind a farm run by “outsiders.” For now, progress comes one person at a time. Anna’s first step has been improving relations with the owner of the neighboring farm. He “rides around [the farm] on his four-wheeler, with his dog on the back,” which is a pretty typical activity for someone living in rural Maine. But it is threatening for the refugee farmers, the majority of whom are Muslim. Culturally, they tend to avoid or even fear dogs. Since Fresh Start first moved into Lisbon, their neighbor has been “pretty unfriendly to the farmers.”
This year, though, he’s started warming up. Just a few days before Anna and I talked, he brought a peace offering of venison to the farm. Anna reflects on the significance of that act of generosity: “he’s really just gotten to know [the farmers], and eventually he realized they’re all working really hard every day like he is.” They have been showing him some of the food they’re proud to grow, and he is starting to share the food he’s proud of with them.
While Fresh Start Farms is already going above and beyond what most CSA programs do to promote social justice with their urban clientele and refugee farmers, Anna hopes that these small moments of compassion and understanding from their rural neighbors indicate the beginnings of real progress towards a CSA program that uses agriculture as a means to support all the communities it touches.