In the meantime, here's a great article featuring Sweet Meriam's Farm...my muse of sorts.
Published July 28, 2008 12:00 am - There are no two-for-one specials here, no bonus card discounts. You won't find fancy packaging, produce imported from Chile or fluorescent lighting.
Goodbye, produce aisle
More shoppers buy shares of crops from farmers
By Damian Gessel
The Daily Item
BEAVER SPRINGS -- There are no two-for-one specials here, no bonus card discounts. You won't find fancy packaging, produce imported from Chile or fluorescent lighting. All Sweet Meriam's holds for the residents who buy its seasonal crop shares is carefully tilled soil, rows of organic vegetables and a healthy dose of rural central Pennsylvania sunlight.
And if you ask them, that's exactly the point.
Sweet Meriam's community-supported crop took root in 2000, putting it at the forefront of a growing movement in the Susquehanna Valley and in the nation at large.
The idea is simple. Folks pay $300 for a half-share, $600 for a full, and then from May through October take home weekly bushel-size boxes of carrots, spinach, lettuce, squash, zucchini and nearly everything else you'd find in a traditional grocery store, depending on the season.
Some shareholders, such as Rebecca Hoover, of Sunbury, take the back-to-the-Earth concept a bit further by working the plot themselves.
"I want the experience of being out here and working with my hands," Hoover said. "It gives you an appreciation of what you're eating."
Hoover isn't alone in her ideals. Far from it. Since a pioneering farmer carried the concept with him to the United States from Europe in the mid-1980s, community-supported agriculture has seeded itself slowly but surely, catching a big headwind from the country's ongoing push for organic foods and recent campaigns urging residents to eat locally. In the last five years, new CSA crops have sprouted in Lewisburg, Sunbury and elsewhere in the Valley. Since Sweet Meriam's started the trend, five other CSA operations have popped up around the area.
The idea's proliferation has actually cost Sweet Meriam's some business. Many Lewisburg shareholders who last year traveled to Beaver Springs for their organic veggies now can find the same just down the road. Union County Commissioner John Showers and his wife, Nancy, have found themselves among the local-food converts. They rent a crop share at Dreamcatcher Farm in Lewisburg.
While many are just turning to the idea that food doesn't grow only in the grocery store, Sweet Meriam's owner Kristen Markley has long subscribed to the concept. She said people are beginning to see the importance of supporting local agriculture.
"People are getting back in touch with where their food is coming from. They want to live a more balanced life," she said.
Markley said when people plug themselves into local agriculture, skipping the supermarket middle man, they reap the dual benefits of helping local farmers and the local economy and wrapping their hands around the freshest food possible.
Sure, maybe that means you'll have to go without strawberries in October. But for Rebecca Hoover, who kneeled in the Earth on Wednesday, plucking sweet peas out in the open air, it's a small price to pay.
"I've learned a lot being out here," she said.
