The Moral Economy Cuts Both Ways
One of the elements of the moral economy present in many CSA operations was landowner-subsidized access to land. I asked the farmers how they got access to their land (in the interviews) and about their rental arrangements (in the survey). These data allowed me to determine whether farmers accessed land at below market-value rental rates (with a subsidy provided by the landowners), which 35 percent of the farms did. In the regression model, this variable is positively correlated with farmers’ earnings, although not quite significant at the 10 percent level. Nonetheless, this relationship suggests that these below market-value arrangements—part of the moral economy of CSA, since the landowners value what the farmers are doing and are willing to be less instrumentalist to support it—do increase earnings for farmers. Since land values are high in California, this is a particularly important arrangement for beginning CSA farmers (Beckett 2011). It is also important to note that these landowner subsidies to land create more room for farmers to maneuver, just as farmers who inherit land, or have it fee simple with their mortgages fully paid off, have more freedom in determining how they will grow and, at least in organics, are more likely to be farming according to the agroecological ideal