CSA & Snap: Business Opportunity For Farmers, Improved Nutrition For The Community

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_13How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Community Supported Agriculture; CSA Food Box; SNAP shoppers; produce incentive programs

Abstract

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) has become a popular alternative available to shoppers looking for local, seasonal produce at a fair price. The numbers of farms offering a CSA has increased in recent years, from an estimated 60 farms in 1990 to over 7,000 today. From the farmers’ perspective, the potential economic benefits of the CSA model include reliable source of income, decreased investments of time and money into marketing, and decreased production costs.

The typical requirement of a lump sum payment in advance of the growing season has, in the past, attracted CSA customers with higher incomes and a deterrent for low-income families unable to pay a large deposit at the beginning of a growing season. However, low-income families participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, are now able to use benefits to purchase a CSA subscription. The United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Services (USDA FNS), the agency that regulates SNAP, is committed to expanding access to farm fresh produce - fruits, vegetables, and herbs - to SNAP recipients while supporting economic opportunities for farmers and producers. USDA rules now allow SNAP benefits to purchase a CSA share, provided that the CSA is operated by a SNAP authorized farm or retail food store and that pre-payment for the CSA share is done no more than 14 days in advance of receiving the produce items.

This paper describes a SNAP CSA pilot and introduces the Farm to Families (F2F) Toolkit which was developed to share best practices and strategies to engage the low income consumer in a CSA, in particular those consumers that receive SNAP Benefits.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Diane K. Smith
AU  - Katherine Selting Smith
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/22
TI  - CSA & Snap: Business Opportunity For Farmers, Improved Nutrition For The Community
BT  - Proceedings of the National Conference on Next-Generation Sustainable Technologies for Small-Scale Producers (NGST 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 105
EP  - 116
SN  - 2468-5747
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_13
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-282-8_13
ID  - Smith2023
ER  -