Our 2022 Schomberg Vegetable Box program has finally been launched. This is our third year organizing this Community Supported Agriculture program and we are glad to continue seeing old friends and welcoming new ones.
There are a lot of different reasons why people decide to join Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs like ours. Let us break down the top 3 reasons…
- Health reasons, either as medicine or preventative. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food resonates with a lot of people. Others really get ‘garbage in, garbage out’.
- Many moms have kids, obviously, and they want to know what goes into their kids’ food. We should all thank mothers for real. They have pushed big companies like Nestle, Gerber, etc to have clearer packaging, better ingredients, or else…
- Many members grew up with great food from the family garden, and now do not have a garden but still appreciate the food. Ask these people if they want a tomato from the supermarket…
Over the last two years, the pandemic has definitely made people ask questions about the food supply chain. For instance, one of our community farm friends, a smart financial guy who never had to think about food before in his life shared his insights about the phenomenon. During the pandemic, he sees some shelves empty for the first time. He reads the signs that limit what you can buy and he starts getting curious about how our food system works. Like others before, he watches documentaries like The Biggest Little Farm, Food Chain$, Fed Up, What the Health, Rotten, and the likes. (It’s nice to know many more films that allow us into the global industrial agriculture system.)
‘What are farmers doing to organize around corporate control in our food system? How can we have resilience in our food system?’ Two of the questions our friend asked.
Farmers and communities have basically been building an independent local food system. By building our own connections and bypassing the conventional industrial food system, we get to choose the type of food system we participate in.
Hence, through our CSA program the Schomberg Vegetable Box, and other activities, we are going direct to the end consumers and building those relationships. We are figuring out how to do it ourselves.
So coming back to the original question of why participating in a local food box like our Schomberg Vegetable Box is a good solution to worries about the supply chain??
- It’s a local alternative and every time we eat local it strengthens those local muscles. As the saying goes, use it or lose it.
- We make our own organic compost inputs and focus on local resources, not perfect, but way more local and not dependent on what happens in the world.
- The food is seasonal, as such you learn how to eat what is actually available locally. It’s easier to be more local when you eat more local. Our program gives you the eating skills you need to be local.
- Our community learns how to save and preserve food for our long winters or to depend less on big supply chains
- We encourage and support garden growing of all kinds. Learn how to make your home garden even better
It’s not rocket science. Go back two generations, and almost everything was local. As energy costs continue to rise and instability in other countries increases, local food will make ‘sense’ again.
Programs like ours or at other local farms are very important to food security, it is easy to think of many ways a food system that relies on resources from around the world can be broken. Hence, we should rethink our food choices and start supporting local food boxes and promoting farmers’ markets.
Support direct from farmer programs. If you are in our community, check us out and know more about our Schomberg Vegetable Box program.
Access direct from farmers is certainly not as accessible or easy as going to the supermarket. If that is where you are right now, you can still have a positive impact on your food system by asking questions about where you buy food. I was surprised to learn how impactful these acts could be when I took a Canadian Food Policy class. Try it out and see if you notice the changes on the shelf.