In addition to entrepreneurial mini-farms, local farming can also be supported through subscriptions (aka Community Supported Agriculture). These subscriptions entitle the buyer to weekly deliveries/pick-ups of fresh produce. Subscription farming grew from 50 farms in 1990 to over 2000 today. Here's an example of a subscription farm directory (uses Google maps to plot locations) -- shares typically run $20-30 a week during the growing season with 400-500 shares per farm (Note: if you do have personal experience with this, please share it!).
What makes this interesting to our exploration of community resilience is:
- Subscription farming (like mini-farming on small plots) spreads the risks (if you know farming, then you know that it is a VERY risky business) among participants and smoothes cash flows.
- It's a model that communities can implement on arable public land, where the rent for the land is provided as a share of the crop to the community.
- If you combine both models (subscription and mini-farms), you can develop hybrid models where individuals rent/manage small plots on a larger parcel and purchase services (from weed/pest control to tilling) from the land's manager.