June 19, 2012 – Everyone knows you can fill your vegetable bin with the bounty of Community Supported Agriculture, the program in which customers pay up front for a season of vegetables and fruits. CSA members often joke about the mountains of kale or other greens in their sacks and what to do with the abundance.
Now an increasing number of growers are selling shares for the protein portion of the plate. Options include grass-fed beef and pork from Austin Brothers Valley Farm in Belchertown, poultry from Apple Street Farm in Essex, eggs from Stony Brook Valley Farm in Granby, and fish straight from the Gulf of Maine via Gloucester-based Cape Ann Fresh Catch.
Each operates a little differently, but like produce CSAs, all enlist customers to pay when they sign up for a series of regular deliveries, helping producers to cover investments and ensuring they will have buyers when the goods come in. In return, customers get what many consider to be a different level of quality: Pork loin chops are sometimes big and thickly cut, chickens have the taste people rave about in European poultry, pristine fish never has an odor because it comes to you hours after it was pulled from the sea, and eggs have large, golden yolks.
Many customers also appreciate a range of intangible benefits: the satisfaction of supporting local businesses, having a personal connection with the people who harvest their food, and minimizing food production’s environmental costs.
“For a while, I had sworn off meat for the house. I was really bothered by large processors, how they kill the animals,” says Melissa Paciulli, 39, of Amherst. “When I found Austin Farms, that was a really important question: Is your meat killed humanely?” Paciulli also appreciates that the animals are grass-fed, for reasons of flavor as well as sustainability, and having the connection with her farmer.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe.