The rising temperature will severely reduce the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada, which currently provides almost as much storage at the beginning of the irrigation season as the state’s man-made reservoirs. By the end of the century, the spring snow pack is projected to decline by 30-70% under the B1 scenario, and by 70-90% under the A1FI scenario. This would drastically reduce water supply available in the late spring and summer, when roughly 75% of all water use in California occurs. Moreover, the rise in summer-time temperatures will cause an increase in the water demand during this period both in agriculture and for urban uses.The result is likely to be an increased scarcity of water in California.Obviously, this can be dealt with in a variety of ways, including water marketing, increased conservation, water rights re-allocation, the improved operation of existing reservoirs, the construction of new reservoirs, and the development of conjunctive use schemes. The likely mix of solutions and their potential cost are being assessed in a case study now being conducted for the State of California. Although we do not cite quantitative results here because the work is still in progress, it seems likely that economic losses could be quite substantial in the aggregate. In the face of an increasingly consolidated, industrialized, and often faceless food system,plant pot drain many researchers and activists have looked to alternative food institutions as ways to improve the food system for both producers and consumers.
AFIs include urban gardens, food policy councils, alternative education programs, farmers’ markets, and community supported agriculture . These last two are of particular interest because many perceive them to be win-win for both producers and consumers. That is, even though farmers’ markets and CSAs were originally developed to provide markets for the increasingly beleaguered small-scale and family farmers, recently the goals of food security have been attached to these AFIs. At least since the 1995 Farm Bill discussions, the community food security and sustainable agriculture movements have made a strategic alliance, combining the goals of farm security and food security in their platforms and projects . Among their strategies for achieving these goals is the continued development of alternative agrifood institutions, including farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture arrangements. The hope is that eliminating market intermediaries will improve the food system for both disadvantaged small-scale farmers and low-income consumers. Is it possible to simultaneously make fresh, nutritious food affordable to low-income people while providing a decent return to small-scale farmers through farmers’ markets and CSAs? Certainly, direct marketing opportunities like farmers’ markets and CSAs can be economic lifelines for small-scale growers, particularly those using sustainable farming practices. Not only do direct markets enable growers to avoid transactions with middlemen and sell products at retail prices , they also often provide the only space through which small-scale farmers with limited production can enter the market.
Less is known, however, about how well they serve low-income consumers. The goal of our research, therefore, was to see how and to what extent California CSAs and farmers’ markets are addressing food security in both concept and practice. We focused our research on these two types of AFIs because they best exemplify the idea of an economic “win-win” situation for farmers and consumers. Also, unlike farm-to-school programs and community gardens, which tend to operate as public-private partnerships, farmers’ markets and CSAs operate more fully under the constraints and opportunities of the market. The majority of our data were gathered through a survey conducted of farmers’ market and CSA managers in California during 2004– 2005. We wanted to get the views of market and CSA managers because they best know the constraints under which their operations must function. In addition, their intentions, decisions, and efforts play a key role in the ways and degree to which food security is addressed in these institutions. Questionnaires were sent to all CSA and farmers’ market managers for whom we could find mailing addresses. CSA contact information came from a variety of online sources. Farmers’ market manager contact information came from USDA, California Certified Farmers Markets, and Local Harvest websites. Managers who were in charge of multiple markets received multiple questionnaires.1 Thirty-seven CSA questionnaires were returned of 111 sent, for a response rate of 33 percent. For farmers’ markets, 157 questionnaires were returned by 101 managers, for a response rate of 35 percent of 443 questionnaires sent to 294 managers. Respondents are fairly representative of the scope of farmers’ market and CSA operations in California .
Most surveyed CSAs were run by single families or individuals. Others were run by non-profits , government institutions , a non-family partnership , and a cooperative .3 There was similar variation among farmers’ markets . Of the managers who answered our question about the type of organization that runs their market, a large majority indicated that they were run by nonprofits ; others were run by government institutions , chambers of commerce , private businesses , or private individuals, groups of growers, and other miscellaneous institutions . In addition, the geographic scope was quite wide. Farmers’ market respondents came from 41 of California’s 58 counties, including counties in all major regions of the state, and CSA respondents came from the major, highly regionalized pockets of CSA activity. We also conducted interviews with a purposive sample of CSA and farmers’ market managers during May through August 2004. To gain more background on the use of entitlement programs by AFIs, we also interviewed key individuals with the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service and one non-profit group involved with managing and promoting entitlement programs for farmers’ markets. While our sample is limited to California, and may therefore reflect particular regional sensibilities, it nevertheless captures a broad range of the possible configurations and characteristics of CSAs and farmers’ markets in the United States as a whole. Despite regional differences in growing seasons, crops produced, and ethnic diversity, our sense is that CSAs and farmers’ markets tend to develop and thrive in particular socioeconomic environments that are likely to be very similar from place to place. We can at least say that our data are representative of the diversity of CSAs and farmers’ markets in California.We asked CSA and farmers’ market managers to rank on a six-point scale how important they thought it was for their AFI type to address issues of food access and affordability for low income people. The vast majority of CSA and farmers’ market managers believe that these institutions should be paying attention to issues of food security. Eighty-one percent of farmers’ market managers and 77 percent of CSA managers considered it important to extremely important . We further asked if they would be willing to employ strategies that other farmers’ markets or CSAs had used to serve low income people. We found significant support for the idea of trying out new Percentage of managers rating access and affordability as important Market managers CSA managers 1–3 18.6 22.9 4–6 81.4 77.1 Mean rating 4.59+1.463 4.46+1.442 a Note: 1=not at all important; 6=extremely important Table 2. Manager perceptions of importance of addressing issues of food security through farmers’ markets and CSAs Willing to consider using new strategies Percentage of market managers Percentages of CSA managers Yes 72.1 64.5 Maybe 10.5 25.8 No 17.4 9.7 Table 3. Manager willingness to consider using new strategies to serve low-income people in farmers’ markets and CSAs strategies to reach low-income people . Ninety-one percent of CSA managers and 83 percent of farmers’ market managers said they would or might consider employing additional tactics to serve low-income people. These data suggest a strong commitment among managers to improving food security through farmers markets and CSAs as a broad concept. We wanted to learn what strategies are used to serve low-income people, especially in light of strong support for the goal of inclusion. On the questionnaires we listed several possible strategies for reaching low-income consumers and provided space for respondents to write in strategies of their own. These data demonstrate that a tremendous amount of effort has been devoted to working to address both access and affordability. Among CSAs, 83 percent of respondents had attempted at least one strategy to attract low-income people ; among farmers’ markets,30l plant pots the figure was 87 percent . In coding responses, we organized these strategies into four categories: direct outreach, discount, food recovery, and entitlement. The strategies and categories for both CSAs and farmers’ markets are found in tables 4 and 5.
There were substantial differences between farmers’ markets and CSAs in strategies used to improve low-income access. Farmers’ markets relied most on the use of entitlements and CSAs relied most on food recovery. As shown in table 5, 82 percent of farmers’ markets have used at least one entitlement tactic, dwarfing the other strategies by a considerable margin. Use of Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program coupons accounted for the largest percentage of entitlement strategies by far; 78 percent of markets indicated that they accept FMNP coupons.On the other hand, none of the CSAs we surveyed use entitlements. CSAs most frequently looked to food recovery as a means to serve low-income consumers, with 61 percent of CSAs having attempted at least one food recovery tactic, usually food donations. A number of examples of internal redistribution exist in CSAs and farmers’ markets. Indeed, the idea of having a community or organization cross subsidize , was, actually, the original vision of CSA. As one CSA manager put it, “the CSA community commits to financially supporting the farm . . . and everyone gets together in a room, the farm budget is shared, and people go around and pledge what they can afford,” but as she noted, it was unlikely to work as a business model in the United States. As an implicit operationalization of this sort of subsidy, half of those CSA managers surveyed have offered discounts of some kind, as illustrated in table 4, although to our knowledge, none have implemented the strong form of redistribution mentioned above. While the analog of this sort of redistribution was not mentioned by our farmers’ market respondents, there are examples of between-market redistribution. For example, the Victory Park market in Pasadena, California was set up specifically to help subsidize growers selling at the lower-income market in nearby Villa Park; growers cannot sell produce at Victory Park without selling at Villa Park as well. The San Francisco Heart of the City’s Wednesday farmers’ market, which draws hundreds of office workers, subsidizes its Sunday market, which draws many more low-income Asians, Latinos, and African Americans from the Tenderloin neighborhood . We also note some success with the indirect subsidies of the nonprofit sector. For example, Tierra Miguel CSA, a non-profit, uses grant funds to supply shares to low-income diabetics through the Indian Health Council and funding from the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Nutrition Network to deliver boxes of produce to nearly 1,000 Los Angeles classrooms. Full Belly Farm CSA, a for-profit partnership, provides donations of produce to a Sacramento area shelter and food kitchen, which are subsidized by a local church congregation. Despite these efforts, managers reported low rates of participation by low-income people, both in farmers’ markets and CSAs .* Other data support these perceptions. For example, it appears that few of those who are eligible for federal food assistance programs participate in these market-oriented AFIs. In 1998, less than 25 percent of food stamp recipients reported shopping at a farmers’ market, and food stamp redemptions at farmers’ markets accounted for only 0.02 percent of overall redemptions . In the case of CSA, a number of studies have found that CSAs primarily serve members with high incomes . There remains low participation on the part of low-income people in farmers’ markets and CSAs despite the intentions and efforts of their managers. Yet AFI managers generally support the idea of improving the affordability of the food they provide, and most have made an effort to put their convictions into practice. How do managers explain the low rates of participation? Given that existing research already shows that CSAs tend to serve a disproportionately affluent clientele, we asked CSA managers, “What do you think are some of the reasons that it is primarily affluent people who seem to participate in CSAs?” We coded the responses to this open-ended question into six categories .