But the two young first-generation farmers say the central building of their operation is a makeshift patio kitchen, open to the elements and the cold winter air and situated right next to the crops. The open kitchen provides them with a space to demonstrate their organic produce to visiting culinary students or wide-eyed elementary school children on a field trip, or just to provide a good snack during a routine 10-hour workday.
Having a kitchen central on the farm is also symbolic, particularly for the four-year-old Blue House Farm, one of a handful of businesses finding success by focusing on community-supported farming, and working to slowly change the eating habits of Coastsiders. It seemed natural to make the kitchen the center of the farm, Conwell said, because changing the eating habits of customers, so they’re eating eco-friendly, sustainable and healthy foods, has to begin where the food is made.
  
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Community-supported agriculture farms, or CSAs, have been a growing part of the local-food movement in the United States since the 1980s. The concept behind a CSA is simple and rather old-fashioned; a farmer grows a variety of crops and delivers them regularly to subscribed customers. At Blue House Farm, customers are delivered weekly boxes of lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, or whatever else is in season, over a period running from May through November.
CSA owners and adherents say the farms defy the conventions of today’s food industry, particularly the dominance of single cash-crop farms that export produce internationally.
The owners of Blue House Farm point to their rapid growth as evidence that local farms are catching on. For next year, Blue House is nearly doubling its farmland and taking on about 60 more subscribed customers. Although the farm remains a small operation with only 150 total customers, rapid expansion is remarkable for any business during a grim economic recession.
Casey says that the unique nature of a CSA makes his business recession-proof. His farm charges subscribers $575 upfront for about half a year of produce. Having money and customers upfront, before harvesting crops, is a godsend for a farmer, he said, because every customer is tied to the success of the farm. He says he considers his customers as investors who literally get to eat the fruits of the company’s profit.
The farmers may be most proud of their own agricultural methods, using traditional practices of planting diverse crops and regularly rotating them. This stands in contrast to most U.S. agriculture, which involves intensely farming one crop to maximize profit. Conwell says that practice can become a downward spiral, leading farmers to become more reliant on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to grow a reliable harvest.
“People these days are looking for well-grown, clean produce,” said Casey. “But sometimes even organic food is taking a short-term view, paying bad wages and using up the land.”
Blue House Farm currently grows more than 120 varieties of crops on a modest three acres of land. Keeping the crops diverse, Conwell says, is a security measure. To use the investment analogy again, it’s like keeping a diverse portfolio. By growing dozens of different crops, the catastrophes inherent in farming, like bad weather and pests, are typically isolated to one crop and don’t affect the entire harvest.
Despite their success, CSAs are reaching only a very small pool of customers. A 2003 University of California, Santa Cruz, study found fewer than 5,000 people who belong to CSAs in the five-county Central Coast region, approximately 0.2 percent of the population.
Scott Morrow, a health officer with the San Mateo County Health Department, says he believes that small community-supported farms will continue to grow. County hospitals, he says, have already agreed to purchase more produce from local sustainable farms. An active CSA customer himself, Morrow says that it might not be long before school cafeterias are stocked with food provided by a distribution system similar to a CSA.
“Local, fresh, sustainable produce is healthier, it’s better and it’s tastier,” Morrow said. “And unless we can move to a farming model like Ned and Ryan ... I don’t think we’re going to be able to sustain our current agriculture system.”
But CSAs aren’t a panacea for the world’s food concerns, and they also have some problems of their own said Paul Pfluke, another Pescadero CSA farmer and owner of Green Oaks Creek Farm & Retreat.
“Some call it fascist farming,” he joked. “Historically, turnaround is a problem because CSAs just aren’t for everybody.”
Talking while he pruned a row of broccoli stalks, Pfluke said that customers can have a hard time surrendering the supermarket’s many choices. For some customers, that means being stuck with vegetables they don’t favor, or getting overwhelmed with repeated weeks of cauliflower, tomatoes or onions. Some customers complain of getting way too much food; others say they get far too little.
Still, Pfluke says that the CSA side of his business is picking up with more demand than his farm can supply. This year, his farm decided to experiment by selling flowers and bread through a CSA program, and also expanding the weeks he delivers into late January, when the selection of crops begins to sharply narrow.
“Business is limitless in this area. I could expand as much as I want to,” he said. “I could grow a lot more and sell a lot more, but I’d worry about my quality of life ... I don’t want to work myself to death.”
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