CSA offers customers a
chance to make a real and
powerful connection with
the farms and farmers that
grow their food, like Amanda
Cather of Plow and Stars
Farm CSA (left) and Court-
ney Buchholtz, formerly of
From the Earth Foods.
Photo: Martin Radigan
hold becomes an essential part of our local and na-
tional conversation about sustainability and resilience,
whether small farms can survive in an era of processed
foods and meal kits, how climate change will inevitably
affect our ability to grow food and how we can both
adapt in a hurry and make powerful changes to our
food system for the long term.
CSA is also a unique form of self-care. Support-
ing a CSA for the season equals a commitment to your
family to bring real, unprocessed food, into your home
on a regular basis. It means that you become part of a
community of people who will help you learn how to
use that food, how to cook with what you have, making
delicious, simple, nourishing meals from ingredients
that were grown within a few miles of your home, on
soil that is cared for and tended by people you know. All
share in common the desire to create healthy meals for
themselves and their families while creating the kind of
support for a small farm that goes beyond the weekly
purchase of a tomato at the farmers’ market. As writer
Michael Pollan puts it, “cooking might be the most im-
portant factor in fixing our public health crisis. People
who cook have healthier diets.”
Some potential CSA customers are concerned that
the commitment associated with the CSA model limits
its convenience. Indeed, in some ways CSA is stubborn-
ly the opposite of the current economy’s on-demand
model. Immediacy is replaced by rhythm and story—the
rhythms of the weekly pickup and the seasonal ebb and
flow of different crops, the ongoing story of the small
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PLENTY I SUMMER GROWING 2019
farm and its meaning within the broader context of the
local food system. Fortunately, some of the perceived
inconvenience of CSA can be offset by the multitude of
well-run CSA farms in the Agricultural Reserve. With
the Reserve’s proximity to such a dense and diverse
population, it is the ideal place for CSA to thrive, and
for this powerful model to grow far beyond the 0.4
percent of American eaters it currently serves.
* * * * *
It’s a raw, cold Thursday afternoon in late fall. The little
red house is packed to the gills with the abundance of
the season: pastured pork, chicken and lamb fill the
freezers while vegetables from spicy arugula to ro-
bust broccoli and cauliflower, delicate squash, and the
season’s last sweet peppers overflow the crates along
the walls. Shareholders make plans to pick up their
Thanksgiving turkeys and swap ideas for holiday side
dishes. Their visits might be shorter at this time of year,
but the mutual sense of gratitude and community is
just as powerful. Farmers and shareholders are so for-
tunate to be part of a group of people who draw hope
and strength from the soil, which contains such mys-
teries and such power to heal itself and those it serves.
Amanda Cather owns and operates Plow and Stars Farm in
Poolesville, Maryland with her husband Mark and their chil-
dren. She grew up in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and farmed
in Massachusetts and Colorado before being lucky enough to
return to the Agricultural Reserve to start Plow and Stars.