FOOD

Louisville families subscribe to local produce

Jere Downs
Louisville

RHODELIA, Ky. – Farmer Adam Barr aims to feed at least 100 Louisville families this year with weekly deliveries of organically grown vegetables. That many dedicated customers is more than double the 48 households he served last year via a service known as Community Supported Agriculture.

Community Supported Agriculture programs, or CSAs, are growing in popularity among consumers who pay upfront at the start of a season for regular shares of a farmer's continuing harvest. Increasing demand from Louisville CSA customers guarantees the future of Barr Farms, he said of the Meade County family farm begun by his ancestors six generations ago in 1835.

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"I am the first generation in three to make a living full-time farming," Barr said Monday from his one-bedroom house near an old school bus recycled into a chicken coop. "That is because of the opportunities allowed by CSAs and what is happening with the local food movement."

The Barr Farms CSA provides roughly two grocery bags worth of vegetables each week, worth $25, and costs $525 for the season. This year for the first time, Barr is offering a half share, about one grocery bag per week, for $262.50. Come mid-May, CSA subscribers will pick up their vegetables from Barr's farm stand at the Douglass Loop Farmers Market on Saturday mornings or the Phoenix Hill Farmers Market on Tuesday afternoons in NuLu. Deliveries cease in late fall, at the end of the growing season.

Long common in Europe, CSAs are becoming more popular in United States. Consumers in the United Kingdom also call CSAs "vegetable box schemes." Around the world, growing popular awareness of the potential health hazards of industrial agriculture are fueling the CSA movement, said Thomas Harttung. Whereas most Louisville area CSAs are small, with an average of 100 to 200 subscribers, Harttung is a Danish farmer and partner in a consortium that serves 45,000 CSA subscribers around Copenhagen. He visited Louisville last week to discuss sustainable agriculture with other experts and Prince Charles at the Harmony & Health Initiative.

"People feel good about CSAs because they know the farmer and they know what they are eating," Harttung said. "The problems can start when they don't know how to cook everything in their box."

For Barr Farms, the bulk of customer growth this year was created by new demand from salaried workers at General Electric's Appliance Park. An internal GE email there last month to 1,000 workers resulted in the recent sign-up of 62 new CSA households. Half of those families are subscribing to Barr Farms, and the other half have signed up for a CSA run by Field Day Family Farm, GE engineer and CSA organizer Bob Kissinger said. As a result, farm staff will soon man a weekly drop-off station in the parking lot of the Buechel factory complex known as "The Park."

Little selling of the CSA program was required, Kissinger said. More and more, people want to know where their food comes from and have faith it is grown in a way that is friendly to the environment and free from harmful pesticides, he added.

"My wife and I are very concerned ... all the toxic herbicides and pesticides and things we are doing to both our food and animals," Kissinger, 58, said.

The challenge of cooking all the vegetables in the box takes practice to master, said Serena Hirn, a stay-at-home mom of two teenagers in the Highlands and a seven-year subscriber to the Barr Farms CSA.

Come May, Hirn knows she will be picking up asparagus, spring onions, beets, radishes and up to 3 pounds of kale, salad mix, Swiss chard and spinach from the Phoenix Hill Farmers Market, 1007 E. Jefferson St., every week. Sometimes, the wax box holds a surprise, she said, such as fresh, pink ginger roots or turmeric.

"My kids and my husband are used to eating lots of greens in the spring," Hirn, 46, said. "When I pick things up on Tuesday, I am already thinking in my head as I drive home about how I will cook it. You have got to be willing to make things up on the fly."

To find a CSA in Louisville, farmers direct consumers to a website run by a nonprofit called Local Harvest. There are at least 30 Louisville area CSAs listed on that website. Pickup locations vary, including farmers markets, retailers, homes and churches. Rainbow Blossom Natural Food Stores CSA customers can pick up their shares Thursday afternoons from one of five local stores.

Besides providing stable income, CSAs also help farmers solve the problem of getting their goods reliably to market. Farmers market sales can be too variable to secure reliable income for growers. Getting local food to consumers remains a challenge in Louisville, even though some subscription services like Green Bean Delivery have captured some market share by delivering local produce and other goods from around the U.S. straight to front porches every week year round.

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More affordable options are coming online to ease access to fresh produce in working class neighborhoods. In Shively, for example, Marvin's Garden Produce CSA customers pick up from gardener Mike Mayberry's small ranch home on Dover Road. If customers can't afford $300 for 20 weeks of veggies, Mayberry is signing up 10 "work share" subscribers to help him garden in his backyard and receive food for free in trade. Those work share members agree to work five half-day shifts in exchange for weekly groceries, Mayberry said. Each share comes with recipes via his website and a weekly email.

Work shares give "access to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it," Mayberry said.

Some nonprofit organizations also help administer CSAs in food deserts plagued by fast food outlets and corner liquor stores. The New Roots nonprofit has long helped communities in the West End and Shively organize delivery by farmers directly to five biweekly "Fresh Stops" at churches and community centers, including a discounted $12 biweekly rate for consumers dependent on food stamps.

This year, the number of such "Fresh Stops" is doubling from five to 10 locations, including a branch in Lexington,. The nonprofit's success has attracted national interest as a way to make food affordable for farmers to grow and consumers to buy. As a result, New Roots organizers Karyn Moskowitz and Amber Burns will showcase Louisville's New Roots system this weekend at the "Just Food" conference at Harvard University, sharing the dais with public health experts and luminaries such as author Francis Moore Lappe of "Diet for a Small Planet."

Besides making local food more available, CSAs also bring down the cost of organic fare, compared to prices found at outlets like Kroger, said Laura Krauser, a geography student at the University of Louisville.

"The CSA is an awesome value," said Krauser, a college junior who worked last summer at Field Day Family Farm and said she will buy a half share. "A lot of my friends are under the impression that local food is too expensive."

Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669, @JereDowns on Twitter and Jere Downs on Facebook.

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For listings of local CSA options in the Louisville area, see www.localharvest.org