Community-Supported Agriculture

“When we started, there weren’t any other farms locally doing what we were doing,” says Ryan Casey, of Blue House Farms, outside of Pescadero, Calif.

Development can often benefit communities at the expense of agriculture; many of Utah’s farms are quickly being replaced by expanding residential, commercial and industrial development. Now many farmers and consumers have joined forces to increase the sustainability of agriculture in Utah with...

April Jones went into farming to grow good food, and she has succeeded. Unexpectedly, along the way she’s also managed to grow a community.

When Dina Brewster’s grandparents bought their place in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1936, the town was dominated by small farms. Many of those farms eventually disappeared to development, or were leased or abandoned. But now some are being revitalized—sometimes, as in Brewster’s case, by the...

Recent estimates indicate only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming and fewer than half of our nation’s farmers and ranchers list farming as their primary occupation.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio

In September, I was one of 28 Junior Professionals and two advisors from USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) who traveled to the Midwest for an annual agricultural training trip. This training opportunity exposed members of FAS’s Junior Professional Advisory Committee (JPAC) to a broad range...