The first two farms started in 1986 and the number of CSA farms in the U.S. had grown
to 12,549 by 2007 (USDA, 2009). This number was a self-reported number and did not include
many of the small, informal farms that may have been participating in the CSA model and not
registering their farm as CSAs. Because there is no national database or even, in the case of
Minnesota, an official statewide database, these self-reported counts are the closest possible
estimates available for the number of CSA farms. A directory of CSAs serving the Metropolitan
Area and outstate Minnesota is maintained by the Land Stewardship Project (LSP) and funded by
the CSA farmers listed in the directory. The number of registered CSAs serving the Metropolitan
Area jumped from 22 in 2004 to 64 in 2007. This listing only includes farms paying to be
included in the LSP directory and does not include farms offering a CSA option but not
registered with the LSP website.