More from The Dirty Life

Excerpt from The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball (page 58)

By the time we’d gotten to Essex, his notion of a whole-diet CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] was complete. He wanted to build a farm that was so diversified it could supplant the supermarket, the kind of farm our great-grandparents’ generation grew up on, but built big enough to feed a community instead of a family. We would produce everything our members needed, beginning with the edible – a variety of meats, eggs, milk and dairy products, grains and flours, vegetables, fruits and at least on kind of sweetner- but expanding, eventually to all the other things a farm could provide, like firewood and building materials, and exercise and recreation. The farm itself should be a self-sustaining organism, producing as much as possible, its own energy, fertility and resources…He still liked the idea of a cash-free economy, but he recognized the need for capital, in the start-up phase at least. Members would pay us one price up front, and there would be a sliding scale for low-income members that would slide all the way down to zero.