How Does a House Become a Homestead? - continued 

Pedro and Gabriel, old bachelors set in their equine ways, co-exist with a flock of ducks. Not far away are the rabbit cages, crowded with littles. Cadbury is retired from fathering duties so Dude does all the stud work. There are four moms and plenty of bun-lets. Rabbits get sold – on the hop of course – and have the commercial advantage of reproducing every few months. How Dori and Keith keep track of all this burgeoning life is anybody’s guess, but it’s my guess that not just anybody could keep up with Dori, who’s always on the hop and on the buzz.

 But the subject was the CSA movement, wasn’t it? Dori and I settle down on a fat cozy  couch in one of several open lounging areas in her commodious double-wide home. We’re definitely going to talk about CSA’s as soon as we look at the wall full of family photos and hear more about Dori’s background.

 Of Cuban descent (she has a great mane of dark chestnut hair and a fair Celtic face), she was adopted by her Scottish mom and German dad at age 15 months after being badly abused. “My mother saved my life. She was a Bruce and was buried with the family tartan.” Dori’s early years were spent on a New York farm where her mother taught her to do everything from scratch. Then there were the apartment years in New Jersey. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that Dori wouldn’t take well to life within small walls. She and her family moved back in to her childhood farmhouse when son Joshua was on the way.  When her father bought the North Carolina campground she and her family migrated – “with the entire Ark”- to a new start in a new area.

 Now she’s back into her dream, her years as a student of business administration and of managing PaPa’s campsites having served her well. That’s where the CSA movement enters our conversation.

 Community Supported Agriculture has its roots in Europe in the bio-dynamic movement, and in Japan. The Japanese impulse was self-protective; people were afraid of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and worried about losing traditionally grown crops to importation. Their response was the rebirthing of agricultural smallholdings and small manageable-size markets. CSA by the European method is a fusion of organic, sustainable agriculture with a model of commerce that springs from the philosophy of E. F. Schumacher (to whom we attribute the concepts of “Buddhist economics” and “intermediate technology”).

 The CSA initiative in the United States began about 20 years ago with a meeting of the owners of Indian Line Farm (members of the E. F. Schumacher Society) in Massachusetts, and Jan Van der Tuin, a European proponent of biodynamics and the innovative economic/technological ideas of Schumacher. Indian Line Farm and the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire quickly set about putting Tuin’s suggestions into action, developing a customer/producer partnership with about equal risk/responsibility. Consumers buy direct from the farm, and farmers obligate themselves to provide organic healthy products.

 Since then, CSA has become slightly more set in its ways, less flexible in practice. It all comes down to the box. People pay up front, in the spring, venture capital that will repay itself with a box full of whatever is growing each week in the summer garden. The farmer has seed money and in return offers a mix of produce depending on the vagaries of the season. Many local/statewide CSA organizations make rules, set prices, and advertise for the members. The push to make the movement more secure and acceptable may be nibbling away its raison d’etre.
 

According to Dori, “CSAs here expect $300 a year per subscriber. That’s their start-up money and they look at it as security.  I look at it as IN-security. What if we have a bad year?” One winter a rampaging raccoon swept through and got most of their chickens. “Mostly the CSA season begins in June and ends in October. I end in September. I don’t trust our Octobers. The weather can get very tricky in October.”

 Though a member of the CSA association and listed on the national website (that’s how I found her) Dori doesn’t emphasize subscriptions. “I have regular customers at the farmer’s market, practically family members. But they want to pick and choose.” Dori would also prefer a price structure (some CSA’s use them) that allows for a different start-up rate for a single person, a couple, a large family, etc.

If she has a subscriber, she is obligated to prepare a box of veggies and fruits, a dozen eggs and two loaves of homemade bread every week during the growing season. Recalling her “torn leg-ament” she asks, “What if something happened and I couldn’t bake every morning?” It’s hard to conceive of Dori not finding some way to bake, make and rake, even with both hands tied behind her back. But she has a point.

It’s not that she isn’t philosophically aligned to the CSA initiative. I’m sure she would agree with the stated purpose of the teikei movement of Japan, the inspiration for the European version of CSA:  “realization of a society where life is duly respected.” And she would undoubtedly feel kinship with the typical organic consumers described in Samuel Fromartz’s recently released survey of the natural foods movement, Organic, Inc, people who feel virtuous because they eat well.

Dori has a business-woman’s eye to the bottom line. With her husband unable to get out and work a salaried job right now, that bottom line has taken on a new significance. I tell her about my own small businesses – writing articles, reviewing and selling books - which I call “Butter’n’eggs – Without the Manure.” We agree that Dori’s enterprise started as a butter’n’eggs sideline – with the manure. Now Dori is striving to make Soaring Eagle work for her as energetically as she works for it. The CSA model isn’t a perfect fit.

“I can see CSA,” I interject, “being ideal in a community like Chapel Hill.” Chapel Hill is the big university and technology center in the center of North Carolina, a magnet to high-paid yuppies who pump up their sense of personal virtue by shopping at the whole foods grocery and driving hybrid Hondas. Whereas in Surry and Yadkin counties, our stomping grounds, Dori assesses: “People are really struggling. There’s no employment. They don’t have $300 to spare.”