A Back of the Napkin look at CSA

After spending a few weeks working on the plan for the Te Matuku Bay property, and an overview of the Waiheke CSA project, I made a presentation to the Waiheke CSA Trust last week. I used a book called "The Back of a Napkin" to help create pictures to describe the What, How Many, Where, When, How, and Why of this project. Click on any picture to enlarge it. Your comments and feedback are most welcome.

VISION

This original vision drawing was done by Meriel, Eleanor and myself in early April.

WHAT

It is possible that we could provide, from the island, all the essential foods and food types needed to maintain the health and well being of our local population.

HOW MANY

The basic numbers represented as rough proportions. As this is a new project the numbers are approximations. This picture is intended to show that we need a small number of Foundation members, a significantly larger number of supporters (those people who contribute a small amount regularly as a pre-requisite for becoming a member), many workers (from labouring, to knowledgeable farmers, to admin and management), still a large number of growers (more on this later), and many acres of land. One 10 acre CSA in the USA provides a regular box of food to 200 people.

WHERE

This is a simple representation of Waiheke. The vertical axis runs through Onetangi and divides the Western part of the island (where most of the population lives), from the Eastern portion (where there is an abundance of open farmland). Think of the circles as different sized pieces of land that are providing food to the community. Thus the meats might be coming from the large blocks in the East, and the intensive high maintenance crops will likely come from smaller blocks in the West. Te Matuku Bay is marked as blacked in. The lines represent the many, many acres of "long mile" (the land between the fence and the road - all over the island).

WHEN

If we are to put times to the project, it will probably be best shown as the number of people being fed (provided box lots of food of all kinds, as shown in WHAT above). Beginning at the bottom of the bar chart, is the Fenwick property and if we stay on this one, we can expect to harvest food in the early part of next year. By locating more land in the East for intensive growing of high maintenance crops, and proper management of it, it should be possible to be providing box lots to 200 people by mid 2010. If we were to double the numbers each year we would be providing significant food to 2,000 people by 2014, and ...

HOW

This is where the details kick in, and even this pic, can only hint at them. The left hand side of this picture points to where we are now and suggests why. The most likely explanations for why there is as yet only a small amount of local produce being consumed, are that there "Is not much available" and "It's hard to obtain". I suggest that there is more available than we see, and that with appropriate management we could be harvesting more of what is there (we have a huge abundance of fruit trees that could be managed via a 'virtual orchard' model) and we could engage many people to grow food for the community (unemployment is on the rise and many people might appreciate a chance to earn some income). If the local food is not easy to obtain, then let's manage that process of harvest and distribution, using the model fo box deliverys, market stalls (eg Ostend market) and special market days (eg a Wednesday CSA market), Shops, Co-Ops, Food Buyers Clubs, and Harvest days (family fun events). I suggest we could be 'importing' food to make up the shortfall of what we can produce locally, as a way to gain data, secure customers and quickly establish the system, that can over time substitute the food we have to bring onto the island. There is a massive amount of detail behind this, beyond what is shown here, and I am happy to engage in dialogue with anyone who wants to explore this.

WHY

The size of each object on this picture represents the amount of food being produced by each of the types, with the un-sustainable Corporate food production providing the most, and being most reliant on capital and fossil fuels, and food supplied Out Of Our Own Back Yards being the most sustainable.

This second image shows where the direction that food production systems seem to be heading. With rising prices of fossil fuels, industrialised agriculture is going to face significant difficultys meeting the demand. As this happens the small scale farms are likely to turn from reliance on fossil fuels and capital and increase their share of production by moving towards more organic and labour intensive methods of production. CSA's will continue to enjoy their phenomenal growth (30% annually since 1990), and Ooooby production will bloom and fill the rest of the gap left by the drop of Corporate agriculture.