To the Editor:
“In general, CSAs are losing their appeal,” Laura Meister notes in Laurily Epstein’s article on Farm Girl Farm, “particularly here in the Berkshires with so many other outlets such as Guido’s and the Coop.”
This is a pretty scurrilous remark on the part of Laura Meister, in my opinion. A backhand slap for no particular reason.
Let it be here stated that a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is not in competition with Farmers Markets. Most of the farmers at the markets are also CSAs on which they largely depend.
The CSA is a good way, perhaps the only way, for a community to ensure its food well into the future. By purchasing your groceries in advance of the growing season you are sharing lumps with those who raise our food. That is, sharing the financial ups and downs of what farmers face every spring. The question of whether the weather will or won’t be good to them this year?
As climate change looms and each year presents more problems for farmers it is now more than ever that CSA’s are the wave of the future. Now more than ever they need our support. It is our food, after all.
Joyce Scheffey
Great Barrington
