Community Supported Agriculture - local food means local wildlife

• Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups aim to restore the links between farmers and the local consumers of the farm's produce. Sometimes a farmer takes the initiative: organising a group of local people to help run an "organic box" distribution system so that the farm's produce can be bought each week by local people. More ambititious CSA groups try to obtain land and create a community farm and share the physical and administraive work of producing the food the community then consumes. There is considerable interest from a number of major organisations in promoting CSAs and grant-aiding suitable projects.
  
  
• Organic Countryside CIC & CSAs A major problem for many CSAs has been obtaining land. Those groups that have land to farm have almost all simply rented it and have limited security of tenure. Quite small plots of land are adequate for a CSA group in a small village using volunteers to do the work and they achieve the two key objectives: producing local food and fostering community cohesion. What they don't do is create organically farmed blocks of land big enough to have a significant effect on local biodiversity. Organic Countryside wants to combine CSA and Wildlife Conservation objectives by enabling a large group of people from a wide area to combive resources for buying farmland that will be professionally managed by a farn tenant. The community living close to the farm will then be encourgaged to form a local CSA group to ensure that most of the farm produce is used locally. Unlike rented land, Organic Countryside farmland will be dedicated in perpeuity to organic farming and so have the long-term furure needed for successful conservation projects

• Land Trusts CSAs that wish to buy land often form a community land trust to do so. Land Trusts can also work at a national level and this is how Organic Countryside plans to work although, initially, it plans to concentrate on its home area of NW Essex..

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