I will note two caveats. First, I have examined CSA because it is
historically a key component of the local food experience
(Henderson and Van En, 1999) and is an evolving institution. Food
hubs, however, are an emerging local food institution that raise
similar questions. Food hubs aggregate produce from multiple
farms and then distribute the produce to customers e or sharers
when it is run in a CSA format e but hubs are generally not farmbased (Barham, 2010). Future research should look at the choices
food hubs make when it comes to dealing with customer or sharer
expectations and the labor and seasonality relationship they form
with their partner farms. Second, I have largely set aside the sharer
perspective in this paper. In some CSAs, sharers are still intimately
involved in farm governance, but they were not so much in these
cases. How do sharers respond to new kinds of CSAs where their
formal involvement may be limited and produce may come from
multiple farms? Will this risk CSA losing legitimacy? In order to
answer it, we must first understand how and why farms come to
scale differently.