For years food justice organizations, urban agriculture projects and small farmers have been trying to figure out how to adapt the popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model to enable low-income people to participate and have access to healthy and fresh farm produce. While offering the usage of food stamps as a way of participating in a CSA seems like one obvious way of reducing the barrier for low-income consumers, the USDA harbors a host of restrictive regulations that make it very hard to use food stamps through CSAs. As a result of these regulatory barriers few efforts have been successful at making CSAs available to low-income participants.

A recent article posted on localharvest.com, an organic and local food website, promoted a break through by one family farm in circumventing the barriers set up by the USDA to provide fresh produce to low-income consumers through a “modified CSA” approach. The article, entitled “A CSA Option for the Poor” describes the steps that the folks at Uprising Organics Farm took to meet their mission of “getting good food to people regardless of income”.

We were thrilled to learn about the solution that Uprising Organics Farm has come up with as we’re in the early stages of developing our own modified CSA program. Since one of our primary goals in developing this program is to build it around food stamp usage and participation, the pioneering work that Uprising Organics Farm has achieved provides a clear path for how we can provide fresh produce to residents of West Oakland. Hooray for small farmer innovation fueled by a commitment to social justice and healthy food for all!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under People's Grocery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.