Community-Supported Agriculture Networks in Wales and Central Germany: Scaling Up, Out, and Deep through Local Collaboration

Abstract

Multiple systemic crises have highlighted the vulnerabilities of our globalised food system, raising the demand for more resilient and ecologically sustainable alternatives, and fuelling engagement in practices such as community-supported agriculture (CSA). In CSA, local farmers and households share the costs and products of farming, allowing them to organise food provision non-commercially around short supply chains. While this may prefigure alternatives to the dominant food system, CSA is considered limited in regard to its scalability and accessibility. While these shortcomings apply to individual CSAs, we know little about whether multi-CSA networks can tackle them by expanding and institutionalising their practices at scale. This paper alleviates this blind spot by investigating local CSA networks in Wales and Germany through a lens of ‘food movement networks’, identifying their scaling practices and encountered challenges. It draws on semi-structured interviews with CSA actors and observations at network gatherings. The paper shows that local collaboration enables CSAs to integrate their supply chains (scaling out), engage their communities (scaling deep), and participate in food councils (scaling up), while further networking at regional level helps new initiatives start up. It also reveals competitive tensions between neighbouring CSAs, which constitutes a hitherto unknown challenge to CSA’s potential scalability.

Community-supported agriculture as food democratic experimentalism: Insights from Germany

“…Strategically, it seems that only a coalition of different actors, comprising CSA, associated movements, municipal entities, and others (if at all) might be capable of generating transformative effects beyond small niches (cf. Bonfert, 2022;Huber and Lorenzini, 2022). In our view, this strategy resembles Dewey's emphasis on collaborative learning.…”

“…This is recognized by many actors in the field who make efforts to collaborate with like-minded initiatives and other potential allies for making the food system more democratic and more sustainable (cf. Bonfert, 2022). This especially holds for individuals who conceive CSA as a transformative movement that is not necessarily bound to a local niche level in the future.…”

“…One arena of collaboration refers to building broader political networks (cf. Bonfert, 2022;Huber and Lorenzini, 2022). To link a CSA initiative with other local food movements, CSA members seek to cooperate with strategic network actors.…”

“…It is wellknown that membership in CSA is driven by classic socio-economic factors, with the level of income influencing spending opportunities and thus membership (cf. Forbes and Harmon, 2008;Lorenzini, 2019;Blome-Drees et al, 2021;Bonfert, 2022). CSA crop sharing tends to be expensive, if compared with food from supermarkets and discounters.…”

Short Commercialization Circuits and Productive Development of Agroecological Farmers in the Rural Andean Area of Ecuador

“…In consequence, the economic aspect of agriculture is focused on commercialization, self-consumption, and barter-trading of products of the harvest, generating incomes for producers. [14,15]. The way that crops reach consumers is another important issue that needs continuous innovation and the improved participation of farmers and allocation of their products [10,15].…”