solidary agriculture

I've discovered an exciting concept for solidary agriculture that has, as far as I could find, three living examples in Germany (although I tend to be better informed about Northern and Eastern Germany, so they may be other similar projects in the south). In English, the concept is called Community Supported Agriculture, CSA. What's funny is that, if you look this up on American sites (it's pretty well implanted in the US), they say the concept originally comes from Germany and Japan, and was then imported to the US. On German websites however, they say the concept comes from the US and Japan - and they thus keep the english term and speak of CSA-hof and and CSA Landwirtschaft. Wonder what it's called in Japanese and why there term never caught on.

In any case, the idea is dead simple and very cool. You take a farm, you make the land and farm common property, you find a bunch of city-people who care about their food, and together they cover the costs of running the farm, on the basis of what they consider solidary organic agriculture to be worth for them or how much they can pay, and these people then get the production, which, thus, doesn't need to have a price anymore. And everybody's happy:
- The people on the farm, because their existence is secured. No need to worry about income, or about selling their production, about retailers pushing the prices down or about volatile prices in general, about having to give up the farm because the market is too tough.
- The people who eat the food, as they get very good food, they know where it comes from, they can see how it's produced on "their" farm, they can go there to enjoy the place, they feel they're supporting a good project. And solidarity makes happy, as psychology studies have shown time and again.

Both groups sacrifice what they don't need - option to have a higher income for the farmers, option to get all vegetables all year round for the consumers.

I spent a while talking to a woman from the oldest CSA farm I could find, Buschberghof. She sounded very nice and told me lots about the way the community functions. The farm has about 80 ha, and the costs for last year amounted to 300.000 Euros, divided up between the 385+ people who are in the economic community, i.e about 65 Euro per person per month for all sorts of vegetables, meat, cheese, milk and variations thereof. Which is probably actually less than what I pay for my food, except that I don't get any meat.

I spent two hours very early this morning on the market to talk with people who work there and see whether they have any interest in co-operating with food-coops. They were generally not as thrilled by the idea as my favourite farmer-woman on my regular market, but it was good to get an idea of how producers distribute their goods, what advantages and disadvantages each form has (Market vs. farmer's basket vs. large retailer vs. food-coop), generally be a bit more informed about what farms and cooperatives are around Berlin.

Perhaps I will write my final thesis on solidary agriculture.