Conclusion: Can CSA Overcome Self-Exploitation?
CSA farms matter greatly because they create a number of benefits. They create increased diversity of cultivated and noncultivated land; a more ecological and nontoxic agriculture; localized distribution that is less vulnerable to the depletion of fossil fuels and disruption of the climate; greater social connections and understandings between producers and consumers; and, in California, year-round employment that is rare for farmworkers. Thus, the analysis presented here is a sympathetic one, meant to provoke further discussions and analyses of the causes and consequences of self-exploitation.
Although the profit rates of some farms for their CSAs are higher than for other market channels, for most CSAs the return to farmers’ labor power is small and for many, nonexistent. Most CSA farmers, like other farmers, undervalue their own work in monetary terms. Thus, self-exploitation in CSA is a real phenomenon and is unjust because of the value that farmers provide to their members and society more broadly. While I have highlighted the different rationalities at work, self-exploitation in CSA should not exist since the original CSA concept insisted on a fair wage for the grower (Henderson and Van En 2009; Lamb 1994). Yet self-exploitation does exist, in part because social embeddedness creates a sense of personal obligation that cuts into farmers’ economic well-being.
I have also argued that rationalities cannot, and should not, be conceptualized as singular. Many farmers are engaging in self-exploitation and enjoyment of their activities and the expansion of a kind of agriculture that they see as an antidote to the industrial agrifood system. Yet even as an AFN, CSA is still subject to many of the tensions arising from its entanglements in a larger capitalist political economy. In the short term, simple commodity producers cannot easily escape being subject to the workings of capitalism, in that they need to accumulate some capital—earn an income—to participate in a “normal,” expected lifestyle in their society (Rainwater 1974). Society needs CSA farmers to have decent earnings, since these earnings contribute to the longer-term viability for their farms and their farming livelihoods, although this should not be achieved through decreasing workers’ wages or environmental degradation. Yet, in the longer term, CSA farmers’ earnings may decline, since barriers to entry are small, economic rents are subject to erosion through competition (Guthman 2004b), and “strategic imitation” (Goodman 2004:9) of CSAs by delivery-based food retailers is occurring. Further analyses could show if competition already reduces CSA farmers’ earnings.
Andrew Lorand, a CSA farmer involved in one of the first CSAs in the United States, Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts (McFadden 2004), noted the importance of farmers’ salaries at the first CSA conference in California: “People are paying you to get a specialized product, but they're not paying you enough to live in the same world that they do. CSA is the first step to that. A CSA is creating a microcosm economic association which must support the farmer to live in the real world … This is a social justice question, a basic issue of democracy and exchange” (Cohn 1993, 20, emphasis added). Following Lorand's logic, what if we compare CSA farmers’—and, by extension, farmworkers’—incomes with those of their members? Doing so gets into uncomfortable territory for those who see class hierarchies and differences in income as legitimate and unassailable, but it is territory we need to explore for a more just world. Just because farmworkers and farmers—the work of both being fundamental to almost everyone's existence in industrial society—do not earn the average household income (or more) does not mean, ethically speaking, that they should not. These lines of thought open up important questions for deliberation within CSA communities and beyond, such as these: how is wealth created, how is it distributed, and by which mechanisms of power? How much should different members of society be paid for what kinds of work?
A practical answer to addressing self-exploitation is for CSA farmers to raise the price of their shares to raise (or create) their salaries. There are also changes in farming and management arrangements that will allow for greater efficiencies, especially through divisions of labor and specialization. Both processes rely more on capitalist rationality than on the mutualistic relationships that are supposed to underpin CSA, and they do not directly confront the large problem that using a “what-the-market-will-bear mentality in determining a share price” makes it impossible for their members “to recognize and know the true needs of the farmers” (Lamb 1994, 44). Another problem is that raising prices runs against one of the values in many AFNs: accessibility. As Guthman, Morris, and Allen (2006, 682) noted, “it is not clear that [CSAs and farmers’ markets] can provide an easy win-win solution for lower income consumers.” 14
Another approach, more in tune with CSA's origins, is through participatory budgeting as done by many of the first CSAs. Lorand (quoted in Cohn 1993, 4) described it this way:
Trauger Groh … gets all his members in a room and says, “This year we are going to produce 36 different vegetables and three kinds of flowers, and if you are lucky we can also sell you some mulch. Here is what we need to do this: these are our costs … these are the salaries … these are insurance expenses.” He lays it out down to the last penny. The members all look at him and turn white. They feel bad because the farmers are getting so little salary, but we are used to that. He goes around the room and everyone pledges what they choose until the budget is covered. This puts a great deal of pressure on individual members. For our budgeting process, we wanted a softer, more Americanized approach. We divided our core group of six members into producer and consumer groups. The producer group determined what to grow and how much it would cost, while the consumers decided whether member families could meet that; then some real negotiation took place between the groups. Next, they showed the rest of the membership the total budget and asked for a pledge of 1/100th of it per family [for the 100 member families].
While they take more time, these processes, fundamental to Steiner's conception of economic associations that underpinned CSA from the beginning (Lamb 1994), could result in more just outcomes for farmers.
CSAs, in theory, should foster an open dialogue about farmers’ and farmworkers’ earnings, how members may better cover them, and issues of access to food. CSA farmers, farmworkers, and members are supposed to be engaging in a moral economy in which these questions are central and, fundamentally, not decided through the dictates of an amoral self-regulating market. This is not just a fanciful idea, since CSA was meant to be a more just food system in our own backyards. Doing anything less allows economic rationality—exchange based on a self-regulating market that is apathetic to questions of justice—to trump the other kinds of rationalities and values that CSA farmers, and many members, hold so dear.