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What is a CSA? A food desert? Six 'urban agriculture' terms explained

Urban agriculture has been popping in metropolitan areas and cities across the world. But what does urban agriculture actually entail? Here are six key terms about urban agriculture that you should know.

2. CSA

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
As part of community supported agriculture, CSA, shareholders pick up produce in the Elmwood Village neighborhood, on Oct. 17, 2013 in Buffalo, N.Y.

Community supported agriculture (CSA) is a community of individuals who support a farm operation that is either legally or spiritually the community’s farm, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Both the growers and consumers support the farm and share both risks and benefits of the farm’s food production. That translates to covering costs and farmers’ salaries, and in return, receiving shares of the farm’s produce.

There are CSAs and similar programs all over the world. In Fall Creek, Wisconsin, the Katydid Ranch is a 40-acre farm with 40 members in a CSA program. Members can purchase shares, which can include foods like kale, snow peas, and radishes during the summer, or eggplant, potatoes, and winter squash during the fall season. In Germany, a similar project called Prinzessinnengarten is an urban farm inside the Berlin Wall. The project took off in 2009 in a site that had been a wasteland for over half a century. Prinzessinnengarten is German for ‘Princess gardens.’ Visitors can pick up locally-grown organic herbs and vegetables at the Prinzessinnengarten.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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