Maine Farms Welcome A Surge In CSA Membership Sales

Agnew says that sales at her farm stand have been brisk, and memberships in her CSA have doubled. (Susan Sharon/Maine Public)

With the depletion of certain items on grocery store shelves and the disruption to the supply chain, there is one thing the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted, and that is the importance of locally grown food. In Maine and around the country, small farms in particular are seeing a surge of interest in what they have to offer, and membership sales in community supported agriculture are especially attractive right now.

At Willow Pond Farm in Sabattus, Jill Agnew starts up her tractor to tend to her fields that are about to be planted. Ever since the pandemic struck Maine in March, Agnew says that sales at her farm stand have been brisk, and memberships in her CSA have doubled. That is a program in which customers buy shares in the organic meat and produce that she raises, and then they pick it up on a weekly basis.

“We’ve already surpassed what I wanted for the year, but I keep signing up because I feel like we finally stepped into the mission of what CSA is, you know, it’s feeding the community,” says Agnew. “And if people are finally seeing that, it’s like, yay!”

Willow Pond was the first farm in Maine to start a CSA back in 1989. Agnew says it took a couple of years for the idea to catch on, but now there are hundreds across the state. Interest in them, however, has lagged with the rise of farmers’ markets, and over the past five years Agnew has struggled to maintain her customer base. But this year, with the pandemic, everything is different.

“No one wants to go to the grocery store and, in the beginning, when I first opened the stand, we had a ton of eggs and, oh my gosh, the eggs just flew out of here,” she says. “I find that people come that are just up the street that may have never stopped here ever before…now I have flour, and I have shampoo, you know, just on a small scale, to see if people need that stuff and they do.”

Read the rest of this story at Maine Public’s website.