Food, land, and community: a social movement in Humboldt County

Community supported agriculture, a form of food production in which the producer and consumer share in the risk and benefit of farming, is a social movement promoting an alternative to industrial agriculture. The origins of community supported agriculture are multifarious. The concept can be traced to several locations in the 1960's including parts of Europe, Chile and Japan (Earles 2007; Henderson and Van En 1999). In the United States in the 1980's, community supported agriculture (CSA) became the nomenclature for this community-based form of farming (Earles 2007). These agricultural developments shared a common theme: groups of people wanting a closer connection to the production of their food and producers wanting to build a connection with their consumers, working collectively to make it happen. CSA, while tailored to the demands of each location and community in which it is situated, is at the core a method for creating the connections between food, land, and community. My inquiry into this movement's manifestation in Humboldt County led me to Redwood Roots Farm in Bayside, California. Here, my goal was to witness the creation and diffusion of CSA movement culture and information, known as knowledge-practices (Casas-Cortes 2000). The knowledge-practices underlying the local CSA movement, I discovered, had theoretical roots in the Marxist concept of class struggle as well as contemporary globalization theory. This experience led to the development of my project for the practicing track of the Sociology Master's Program: a two-part curriculum for Redwood Roots Farm. The goal of this project is to empower community members to make socially and environmentally responsible decisions to influence a sustainable future for Humboldt County. The first curriculum, entitled "A History of Agriculture in Humboldt County" explores the development of local agricultural practices and organizations, focusing on the contemporary social forces that are shaping the agriculture of Humboldt. The next curriculum, "Everything You Want to Know About Land Trusts" describes land trusts as a tool for land preservation, highlighting local land trusts and their importance to the preservation of land for agricultural use and the CSA movement. In addition to facilitating the curriculum in workshops for the 2008 Community Workshop Series, I have made my work available for community access in the Redwood Roots Library.