Given the location- and context-specific nature of farming and its heavy reliance on know-how, or
techne (instead of just know-what, or episteme), the fact that CSA farmers rely most heavily on people
with farming experience is not particularly surprising. Off-farm information providers typically do
not provide expert knowledge in the embodied sense of someone who has worked long and hard
and grappled intimately with similar circumstances. Instead, the information they provide is at a
more basic level that must then be tailored to specific contexts of farming (cf. Murdoch and Clark
1994) and specific CSA types. Nevertheless, off-farm information providers play a role supporting
CSAs, and most CSA farmers do access them, even if less frequently than people who farm.
Some University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) advisors are fulfilling an important
role that is widely recognized by CSA farmers in their area. As an information source, UCCE
advisors ranked just below other farmers and farmworkers. Cindy Fake and Roger Ingram, Farm
Advisors in the Nevada-Placer Counties UCCE office (University of California Division of
Agriculture and Natural Resources 2011), were mentioned often and with great appreciation by
many CSA farmers in the northern part of the study site. As for other off-farm sources of
information, most farmers do not use independent agricultural consultants, but for a few they are
quite important. That input dealers are the lowest ranked speaks to the strength of the norm of
resource self-sufficiency among CSA farmers and the dearth of input dealers who specialize in
farming systems like those on CSA farms.