Small Farm Central

According to the USDA, the United States has 12,549 farms that participated in a CSA program in 2007 (download the report here). Local Harvest reports having 2,700+ profiles of CSA farms in their database.

The USDA reports the total number of farms in the country at 2,204,792 which means about 1% of US farms participated in a CSA in 2007. I think this is a useful way to think about the CSA movement even if both numbers are flawed.

It would be more interesting to know how many local-type farms participated in a CSA program, because we know that many of those 2 million+ farms are corn/soy operations, hobby farms, or otherwise very far from participating in a CSA.

Another statistic in the report is "Produced and Sold Value Added Commodities" with 78,418 farms reporting. Maybe that is closer baseline to look at than total farms? With that baseline, the percentage of farms participating in a CSA is closer to 20%.

Either way, I think the 12,549 number is useful. It is not a complete picture depending on how you define a CSA and a farm's partipation in a CSA program. Then there is the discrepancy between the LocalHarvest number and the USDA number. More revealing will be how the numbers change over the next several years.

Several other blogs have posted on this topic:
The Robyn Van En Center
The anti-view from a LocalHarvest blog

Of course, we love CSAs. The Member Assembler has signed up almost 5,000 CSA members this year so far.