We Started a Farm Without Debt

And here’s how you can too

My husband and I just finished our 5th year of running a small community-supported agriculture (CSA), growing vegetables for over 60 families using only 1.5 acres of land. A CSA is a model of farming where members pay upfront before the start of a farm season for a share of what is harvested every week throughout the season.

CSAs are a risk-sharing model of farming. Farming can be unpredictable, and members know that at the start of the season. No two seasons are alike. To maximize production and minimize the risk of losing large crops, most farmers who run a CSA plant a wide variety of produce. We average about 60 crops per season, and a few of them will have a bad year. When you start with a wide variety, it’s not a big deal if a few things don’t grow.

Running a CSA had been my husband’s dream ever since a summer internship on a farm he completed while he was working toward his degree in environmental science. He loved it so much he went back to work season after season for very little pay, just for the learning experience. Even though I ended up in a completely different profession, I used to love tagging along with him on his farm days. There was something so soothing about spending time working with nature.

It took another 10 years for us to find the right land and get his CSA up and running. And we did it without falling into many of the traps new farmers find themselves caught in, pushing them toward unsustainable growth models. We love our farming lifestyle, even though we will still be working for a while to get our farm where we would like it to be. Over the last 5 years, we’ve grown gradually building up from our first 10 CSA members during our first season to over 60 members following our fifth season last year.

We’ve experienced steady growth every year and learned a lot in that time, all without taking on any debt or an unsustainable lifestyle to support our small farm. We’ve expanded into growing flowers, along with a larger quantity and greater variety of vegetables and next year will be raising egg-laying chickens. In the time…

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