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What difference does income make for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members in California? Comparing lower-income and higher-income households

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Abstract

In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ (1) socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, (2) household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and (3) CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households (LIHHs) and higher-income households (HIHHs)? We divided members into LIHHs (making under $50,000 annually) and HIHHs (making over $50,000 annually). We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ (1) employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; (2) conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and (3) sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: (1) the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, (2) the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and (3) the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA.

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Notes

  1. Zepeda and Li (2006) have shown that these interests do not necessarily equate to participation in a CSA, and Russell and Zepeda (2008) showed that interest in cooking, and openness to change in diet and purchasing practices, are good indicators for likelihood to continue with a CSA.

  2. Hinrichs and Kremer (2002) measured participation as a count variable (from 0 to 6) in terms of engagement in various CSA activities: spring festival, cooking classes, children's activities on food distribution day, farm field day, other family activities at the farm, and harvest festival.

  3. These findings contradict the conclusions of Pole and Kumar (2015, p. 1495), who, using the same data, found that higher-income households in 2010 in New York made up the greatest proportion of “Quintessential Members”—defined as “the ideal CSA member who cares about all aspects of the CSA, especially building a sense of community.” They attributed this preponderance “to the fact that Quintessential Members are committed to the ideals espoused by the traditional notion of CSA and they are willing to pay almost any fee, regardless of their income” (Pole and Kumar 2015, p. 1498). Yet, they did not present the proportion of the kinds of members within each income category. Indeed, it is not surprising that higher-income households make up the greatest proportion of Quintessential Members because they also make up the greatest proportion of all members. To understand if low-income households are more or less likely to be Quintessential Members than members with other incomes, we should examine the proportion of low-income households that are Quintessential Members in relation to the total sample of low-income households, then compare these same proportions across income categories. Doing this by using the data they present in their article (Pole and Kumar 2015), we find that the lower-income households in their sample are more likely to be “Quintessential Members” (as a proportion of all low-income households in the sample) than higher-income households (also as a proportion of all higher-income households in the sample). The proportion of members within an income group that are “Quintessential Members” goes down consistently with each step up in income in their data. Looking within each income category, there is a clear trend: 45% of households making $0–15 000 are Quintessential Members, compared with 39% of households making $15 000–35 000, 33% of households making $35 000–$50 000, 32% of households making $50 000–$75 000, 26% of households making $75 000–125 000, and 17% of households making over $125 000 (data from Pole and Kumar 2015, p. 1496). This trend suggests that lower-income members are more likely to be committed to CSA, and is entirely consistent with Pole and Gray’s (2013) findings.

  4. Some lists contained community-oriented farms using direct marketing channels that are distinct from CSA. These farms were excluded.

  5. We can calculate the response rate for most individual CSAs since we surveyed the CSA farmers/operators in a previous survey and collected data on member numbers (Galt et al. 2015). Of these 11 CSAs for which we have data from the farmer, only one accepted Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT, how the state of California distributes benefits to recipients of CalFresh and other food support programs) at the time of the study. Of the 115 member respondents from that CSA, only three are CalFresh users.

  6. Approximate average income was calculated by taking the midpoint of each category, with the assumption that $300 000 was the midpoint for the households earning $200 000 or more.

  7. This differs from the state as a whole, where 47% of children are in low-income households (National Center for Children in Poverty 2015).

  8. It could be that many of the LIHHs involved in CSA have the potential for upward income mobility in the future, as some members are likely to complete degrees and may commence full-time work or receive higher paying jobs.

  9. There were 1 660 302 participants in WIC in California in 2012 (Johnson et al. 2013, p. A-5), out of the state population of 38 000 000.

  10. There is a significant, positive association (as expressed by the phi coefficient, also known as mean square contingency coefficient, arrived at through a Pearson correlation run on two binary variables) between some graduate school and had an adult member moving into the household—rφ = 0.07, p = 0.01—while phi coefficients between other educational levels and this variable are not strongly associated.

  11. This was based on previous research showing that CSA farmers in California’s Central Valley have median annual earnings of $6 750 per farm partner, while the average was $25 408 (Galt 2013).

  12. Although we did not ask, we suspect that LIHHs are more likely to use their shares to fill most or all of their vegetable needs (as Lang 2005 showed), which would explain why they were less satisfied with appropriate diversity of products in the share than HIHHs, and why they would have a larger gap between satisfaction and importance for the two attributes of affordability and diversity of products in the share.

Abbreviations

AFNs:

Alternative food networks

CSA:

Community Supported Agriculture

LIHH:

Lower-income household (for our purposes, those with annual earnings under $50,000)

HIHH:

Higher-income households (for our purposes, those with annual earnings over $50,000)

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Acknowledgements

We thank the numerous CSA member households and CSA farmers who kindly participated in this research. We are also thankful to the papers’ reviewers and the journal editor for their helpful comments that greatly improved the paper. This work would not have been possible without a competitive grant Dr. Galt received from University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, 1309 Hart Hall, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Ryan E. Galt

  2. SIT/World Learning, Inc., 1 Kipling Road, Brattleboro, VT, 05302, USA

    Katharine Bradley

  3. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University, B314 Clark Building, Fort Collins, CO, 80523, USA

    Libby Christensen

  4. University of California Cooperative Extension, Nevada County, 255 South Auburn Street, Grass Valley, CA, 95945, USA

    Cindy Fake

  5. Geography Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, 133 Hunt Hall, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Kate Munden-Dixon

  6. Community Development Graduate Group, University of California, Davis, 133 Hunt Hall, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Natasha Simpson

  7. University of California Cooperative Extension, Los Angeles County, 700 W. Main Street, Alhambra, CA, 91801, USA

    Rachel Surls

  8. University of California Cooperative Extension, Marin County, 1682 Novato Boulevard, Suite 150, Novato, CA, 94947, USA

    Julia Van Soelen Kim

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  1. Ryan E. Galt
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Correspondence to Ryan E. Galt.

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Galt, R.E., Bradley, K., Christensen, L. et al. What difference does income make for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members in California? Comparing lower-income and higher-income households. Agric Hum Values 34, 435–452 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9724-1

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