Second, a small number of farmers make a decent salary from their operations. Farmer 39A, with higher-than-average earnings, added a CSA premium, thereby likely capturing community economic rents; she noted that her CSA earns a 16 percent profit, while other direct marketing channels return 8 percent. This farm also has one of the best accounting systems of the interviewed farmers. 6 Another high-earnings farmer noted that he could not have purchased more land without the CSA, so it was an important strategy for capital accumulation. This finding is consistent with Hardesty and Leff's (2010) in-depth assessment of the finances of three CSAs which found CSA to be a more profitable channel than wholesale or farmers’ markets when time and labor are taken into account. Given how hard these farmers work, their often decades-long experience building their skills and knowledge and farming systems, and the norms of a capitalist economy, it is hard to begrudge them being well compensated for their work. This is especially the case in the context of the contemporary United States, in which entitlements, such as health insurance, retirement, and sending children to college, are not well provisioned by a social safety net and are therefore expensive for households (this is particularly true for health insurance, especially relative to other industrialized nations). Those CSA farmers who are self-employed do not receive employer-provided benefits and thus are forced to go without, or to self-provision these basics through their monetary compensation, or to access them through a family member with an off-farm job.