04/05/2008

By LAURA GIOVANELLI  / Associated Press

Some people start with a recipe and then go shopping.

Tara O'Leary did just the opposite last summer. Each week, she picked up a box of produce from Cindy Conti, a farmer who raises organic produce in Yadkin County. Sometimes, she would find salad greens. Sometimes there would be squash, sometimes radishes, carrots or okra.

"I come home and I open the box of stuff, and I see beets," O'Leary said. "Then I go to my cookbooks and think, 'What can I do with all these things?'"

The Winston-Salem Journal reports that despite the popularity of farmers markets and the growing push to eat locally and seasonally, most Americans still get their produce by wheeling a cart among grocery-store bins filled with fruits and vegetables shipped — at considerable expense and use of energy — from all over the world. But as people get more interested in buying high-quality food grown close to home, there's a small but passionate group of people across North Carolina and the U.S. who take buying local to another level. They're filling their fridges with produce from area farmers by buying memberships in community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs.

CSAs aren't the most predictable or convenient way to buy food. Some of their members, though, say they are supporting local farmers while they are eating a greater variety of produce that tastes better and doesn't use a lot of fuel to get to them.

CSA members pay upfront, usually hundreds of dollars, to buy a membership for a growing season. In return, they get a box of produce each week throughout the late spring, summer and fall, either delivered to their home, assembled for them to pick up on the farm, or, more often, dropped off at a central location.

By paying upfront and buying direct, members take on the same risks as farmers. There can be drought and frost, extreme heat and cold. Some crops might be bumpers, others might wither entirely. There are no guarantees that there will be lettuce. You might get more squash than you know what to do with. The extreme drought last summer meant that some CSAs had to skip deliveries some weeks, offering apologies and promises to load boxes with more produce when they could.

"When you plant a crop, you just don't know how it's going to do," said Sharon Weatherly, a farmer who runs a CSA and grows produce for farmers markets in northern Randolph County. "Sometimes you have crop failures. Really, that's what the CSA is all about. They're taking the risk as well as the rewards with you."

That's quite different from what we expect from grocery stores. And it's contrary to what generations of American have learned going to supermarkets, expecting to find almost whatever we want — apples in April; melons in March; oranges, pineapple and watermelon year-round, no matter where we live.

Conti, on the other hand, brings the vegetables she grows in fields and greenhouses only when she has them. She might give customers week after week of kale or radishes because that's what's in season and thriving. Lettuce might have to wait a week because it's not ready to harvest. As a bonus, Conti might be able to offer handfuls of black walnuts gathered around the farm to whoever is willing to try to crack them.

On Sanders Ridge Farm, Conti is getting ready for this year's growing season. On a recent wind-swept March day, she showed a volunteer how to make soil blocks, or small molded squares of soil used to start seedlings. Conti sprayed a plastic box of soil with a hose, then thrust in her bare hands, mixing the dark earth as if she was making a giant meatloaf.

Conti is somewhat of a produce evangelist. She tells a story about winning over one CSA member she had who called her up, confused by the green and yellow tomatoes in her box. The woman wanted a refund. Conti cajoled her into closing her eyes, and just taking a bite.

When some of her customers talk about Conti's beets and carrots, her lettuces and her tomatoes, it's as if they are describing precious works of art. "I didn't know that beets could taste so good," said Bonnie Lasky of Boonville. "I had never really had anything but pickled beets out of a jar. I was not a big eggplant person, and it was probably because I just didn't have any that tasted good."

But for most people, grocery stores are tough to avoid entirely. And in the winter, we pretty much depend on them.

"I have a pineapple sitting at home that I bought at Costco that I have to cut up," admitted Dave Petri, who lives in Mount Airy with his wife and two daughters. He drove more than an hour about once a week last year to pick up his family's box of produce from Conti.

"It's not that we won't buy other things," Petri said. "It's just during the growing season, we don't buy those things.

"It's a paradigm shift for people. Why should I pay for produce that was grown in southern California? We want to eat strawberries? Well, strawberries are only in season once a year. We should enjoy them then."

Although community-supported agriculture sounds as if it has roots in the back-to-earth movement of the 1960s and '70s, the commonly accepted founding farms of the CSA movement didn't surface until the early- and mid-1980s in the Northeast.

Today, there are hundreds of CSA farms across the country.

The idea has been slower to take hold in North Carolina, but Roland McReynolds, the executive director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, says that's changing.

In 2006, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association listed 40 CSAs in North Carolina in its annual farm and food guide. In 2007, there were 50, most of them around the Triangle. The guide isn't meant to be a complete list of CSAs, because the organization relies on farmers to notify them. The association is a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable agriculture in North and South Carolina.

Weatherly has been turning away customers this year. "There are more people wanting to join a CSA than there are farmers doing a CSA," she said.

Fuel and weather But CSAs aren't for every farmer, either, McReynolds said. Farmers need to budget in the cost of gas for delivery, he said. They need to have a diverse crop so they can give their customers a variety, but still operate on a manageable (usually small) scale. "There are times of the year when it's very easy to do that, then there are times of the year when it's less so," he said.

Between the late frost last April, the drought and rising fuel prices, 2007 was especially tough on the state's farmers.

It hurt Weatherly so badly that she decided to scale back her CSA. She had between 60 and 70 customers last year, but she's capping membership at 25 this year. She won't be delivering to Winston-Salem at all. All of her customers will have to go to her stand at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market to pick up their produce.

"We couldn't get things to germinate because we had no rain," she said. "At the end of the season, I was just giving customers potatoes, and I was saying, 'Thank God, I have potatoes,' because everything else was dried up to a fizzle."

The drought was hard on Conti last year, too, financially, physically and emotionally. Throughout the summer and into the fall, she sent e-mail after e-mail to her customers, apologizing for the limited variety of produce in their boxes or wringing her hands about a week when she didn't have enough to distribute much of anything. Most of them seemed to understand, she said.

Still, Conti says that her CSA grew from about five members in 2005 to more than 75 in 2007. This year, she hopes to get at least as many signed up for weekly boxes of produce, each paying as much as $770 for about 10 pounds of vegetables and herbs a week from May to September.

That's a lot of money to many people, but Petri says he thinks of it as an investment in a local farm. "The dividend on my investment is the crop she produces. We know the risks, but we also know the rewards."

Seedlings are already sprouting in Conti's greenhouses. Some are ready to be transplanted. There are trays of eggplant, broccoli and peppers, and lots of tomatoes — heirloom varieties with their old-fashioned names scrawled on little plastic tags and stuck into trays of damp, dark earth: Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra and Conti's favorite, Lillian's Yellow.

"They're the ugliest things you've ever seen," she said recently as she looked over the trays. "They're real firm, and they've got almost a smoky taste to them."

Then she cupped her weathered hands in front of her, as if the tomatoes were already ready to pick.

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Information from: Winston-Salem Journal, http://www.journalnow.com