Here are some pictures from the farm at Rutgers that Charlton, Marley and I worked on together. The Cook Student Organic Farm has been around since 1993, and has been running a CSA program since then. They started cultivating 1 1/4 acres of crops in 1994 and were growing on 3 by 1996. CSOF started out with 24 shares at $150 per share the first year. The 2007 season had 130 shareholders at $400 per share. We grew on 3 1/2 acres. Though the farm has a professor as a full time advisor, it is the students who take charge of every operation, from seed ordering in winter to cover-crop planting in the fall. Oh, and something really cool happened with I bought a book not too long ago called "Sharing the Harvest - A Guide to Community Supported Agriculture" by Elizabeth Henderson. As I flipped through the pages, I realized that 3 pages were devoted to explaining how a CSA program can work in a university setting - and they chose CSOF as the model! I bought a book to learn about the CSA movement, and it turns out we're in the book! It was then that I realized just how small this movement is. It was first developed in Japan in the mid 1960's and was brought to America in the mid 1980's. Figures say that in 1990, there were 50 CSA projects in America. 600 projects were up and running in 1996 and by now, there are around 2,200. Make that 2,201.
