For the past 20 years, we have heard a great deal about Community Supported Agriculture as a
novel marketing and community-building concept. The accepted history of Community Supported
Agriculture in the United States is that Jan VanderTuin brought the concept from Switzerland in
1984. CSA projects had been sprouting up there and in other parts of Europe since the 1960s. Such
enterprises also were found in Japan in the 1960s when women’s neighborhood groups began
approaching farmers to develop direct, cooperative relationships between producers and consumers,
known as ‘teikei.’