More specifically, CSA farmers’ descriptions of their CSA pricing strategy and how it relates to farmers’ markets show that they often do not take into account the extra labor of CSA. These often unaccounted for costs include coordination efforts to keep track of membership, writing and printing newsletters, hosting farm-based events, and box and transportation costs. A common practice in calculating the CSA share's exchange value was to use only the farmers’ market exchange value of the produce included in the share. Some farmers use that price and give members a discount. As Farmer 27 noted about pricing his shares, “It's basically [farmers’] market value, minus … 15 to 20 percent.” This pricing strategy can mean that CSA box prices could be below the cost of production, especially if compensation for farmers' own labor power were not included.
It is generally assumed that socially embedded market relationships translate to less exploitation of farmers, since consumers are supposed to be more willing to share risk and to commit for the long term (or landlords are willing to cut CSA farmers a break, as was mentioned earlier), but these data show that social embeddedness also cuts in the opposite direction. A different form of surplus extraction replaces the surplus extraction that occurs from unfair market exchanges in conventional markets. Unfair exchanges can be self-imposed because of a sense of obligation to CSA members, to whom farmers often feel close. In other words, greater social embeddedness can allow for a sharing of risk, as CSAs were originally conceived of doing, and even the commodification of these relationships into community economic rents, as suggested by the CSA farmers with the highest earnings, but it can also enhance the farmers’ sense of obligation to members to the farmers’ economic detriment. For example, many CSA farmers noted that they tended to give too much produce in their shares. As Farmer 13 stated, “I actually made … my CSA shares smaller because I kept [saying], you know, ‘I really want them to get a good value,’ and they [members] go [in the farms’ questionnaires], ‘We can't eat that much!’ [Laughing.] That was consistently the feedback I got. ‘This is too much!'” Others mentioned the psychological pressure, an interpretation consistent with the regression model: