Contrary to the widely held belief that CSA originated in Japan, McFadden
(2004) found the roots of the U.S. CSA movement to be inspired by the biodynamic and
anthroposophy ideas developed by Austrian Philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Steiner
developed the concept of biodynamic agriculture in the early 1920s while assisting
struggling German farmers. Lovel suggests that biodynamic agriculture “is the oldest
organic agriculture movement in the western world” (2000: 42). Anthroposophy is a
worldview described in Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom published in 1893
(Rudolf Steiner School 2008). Simply, it is the “study of the wisdom of humanity…[and]
is sometimes referred to as spiritual science” (Lovel 2000: 2). Anthroposophy concepts
incorporated into the original CSA farms include new forms of property ownership, new
forms of cooperation, and new forms of economy (McFadden 2004). A fundamental
anthroposophic idea built into the structure of the first two U.S. CSA farms and now
incorporated into CSAs throughout the country is the reliance on producer-consumer
associations “where consumers and producers are linked by their mutual interests”
(McFadden 2004). This history of CSA suggests that two agriculture activists, Jan
VanderTuin and Trauger Groh worked with Steiner’s ideas in agricultural settings in
Europe and eventually returned to the U.S. to play a major role in the creation of CSA