Earth Day is celebrating its 40th anniversary on Thursday, April 22, 2010. With environmental issues and possible resolutions taking center stage the last decade, the popular phrase “going green” has catapulted into most people’s modern day lexicon.

From recycling all applicable waste to switching to reusable grocery bags, initiatives to help mold a new generation, a more environmentally conscious one, are in effect. I often read about the rapid demise of the Earth due to an explosive population and its inhabitant’s reckless conduct with the conclusion always persuading readers to do their part in the “going green” initiative. I feel moved, but perplexed as to how I, one individual who often feels insignificant in the wider scope of things, could really be of any service in fixing this global crisis.

It wasn’t until I learned about the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement that the fragmented pieces of confusion finally formed a clear picture.

CSA is an international program that started in Japan and made its way overseas to the U.S. in the mid-1980s. Its purpose is to remind consumers how food travels from farm to table, and is starting to gain more supporters and participants.

CSA provides an outlet to bring together consumer and producer, buyer and grower, in a more direct and symbiotic relationship. Most CSA farmers are typically small-scale, organic producers, like Tom Willey.

Willey is the owner and farmer of T&D Willey Farms, based in Madera. T & D Willey’s CSA entails members of the community pay a fee to receive a weekly allocation of the farm’s produce, which provides financial support for the farmer and reliable, fresh produce to the buyer.

Willey stated there are more than 800 members in his farm’s CSA with members stretching from Merced to Reedley, the bulk of participants residing in Clovis. Prices start at $15 a week for the small box that feeds one to two people and $20 for the larger family box.

Each week members pick up boxes from a specified location in their town and leave with fresh, seasonal fruits and vegetables without scouring aisles at a grocery store and without worrying where their food has traveled. The produce, from Willey’s 75-acre certified organic farm, is usually picked, boxed and shipped on the same day.

CSA’s are expanding as people become more concerned about rising food costs as well as who is producing their food and how it is produced. CSA focuses on redirecting farming practices from large, chemically driven farms to organic, family-owned farms. It maintains the idea of sustainable agriculture by changing the food system from an indirect and commercially owned practice back to its origins of people learning how to eat primarily what they can grow.

Other forms of CSA encourage community members to grow a specific crop in compliance with other neighboring residents who then interchange produce within the group. The neighborhood garden model enables members to gain hands-on experience growing their own food. Other methods invite customers to work on the farm in trade for a portion of their weekly subscription costs.

The underlying purpose of the CSA is to make people more involved with their food production and reforming the food system where it was 100 years ago, when control lay in the hands of the public, not corporations. In a generation where farmers are diminishing and genetically modified crops are expanding, programs like the CSA strive to bring food production back to a community labor and less of a commercialized trade.