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FeedFrom the Ground Up
Community Supported Agriculture has never been more popular in the western suburbs. We explore a few of the more vibrant and unique CSAs and related organizations—all of which give us reason to believe that this is only the beginning.
Photos by Jared Castaldi Published June 28, 2010 at 04:14 PM
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Sam Cantrell once worked for others. He managed the Japanese garden at Swiss Pines in Charlestown Township, later becoming the first superintendent of Springton Manor Farm in Glenmoore. Then he served as director of programs and facilities for the Brandywine Valley Association.
When none of those employers would implement the concept of Community Supported Agriculture, he left the BVA in 1995 and decided to farm himself. Two years later, he opened his own CSA at Maysie’s Farm in Glenmoore.
At first, Cantrell sold only to restaurants and health food stores. In his third season, he went directly to the public at the West Chester Growers Market. “By the mid-’90s, it occurred to me that we had bigger conservation issues in Chester County than just saving open space and farmland, but more so creating a local, sustainable food system,” he says. “If no one else was going to do it, then I was going to do it.”
These days, local CSAs are oversubscribed, with long waiting lists. But when Cantrell started his in 1997, there was only one other active CSA in Chester County at the Kimberton Waldorf School. “Now, there are about 20 [in the county],” he says.
Cantrell’s CSA had 50 shares the first year, 116 households by the second year and 160 now. He also sells at two farmers markets—one on Wednesday afternoons at the Anselma Mill in Chester Springs, which he helped start two years ago, and another on Thursdays on the Penn State Great Valley campus. During the school year, he sells modest amounts of produce (from an unheated hoop house) to the Montgomery School in Chester Springs and Conestoga High School in Berwyn, where a special-needs class re-sells the vegetables as part of its curriculum.
Cantrell is working the farm on which he was raised. Starting in 1954, his father ran a classic homestead farm. After a divorce, his mother rented the fields to “chemical corn growers.”
Her son rescued the property. “Now, there’s a healthy ecosystem,” says Cantrell. “The first step was insect control, then weed control. But great soil will grow great weeds.”
Cantrell has 7 acres of organic vegetable beds. He grows just about everything to meet his members’ basic needs, along with more “exciting” crops like escarole, endive, radicchio, fava beans, edamame soybeans, okra, celeriac, fennel, kohlrabi, daikon and scorzonera. There’s also a wide variety of stir-fry greens, including collards, Swiss chard, yukina savoy, Tokyo bekana, komatsuna, broccoli rabe and more. “We get the seed catalogs and say, ‘What looks good? Let’s try these,’” says Cantrell. “We encourage diversified diets.”
Weekly e-mail updates highlight specialties and a recipe based on the week’s offerings. To supplement his melons, watermelons and blackberries, he planted 200 blueberry plants this season for the first time.
Cantrell has a cooperative marketing arrangement with other farms for items he doesn’t offer—things like organic, pastured chickens, eggs, beef, pork and raw-milk dairy products, organic breads, and wild-caught Alaskan salmon.
“It’s the way it used to be,” he says. “It’s a wonderful, locally sustainable food system, and it’s totally achievable in southeastern Pennsylvania, where we have enough space to grow and where there are few places with a better quality soil,” Cantrell says. “With population, we also have the people who need to eat.”
Trouble is, there aren’t enough farmers. “That’s the most serious bottleneck,” he admits. “A big thrust of our organization is to continue encouraging new farmers.”
