Looking at the size of your shares over the year, I can't help but wonder what the price of your share is?

Answer 1

Over the last decade or so, for southern Ontario where I am, CSA share price has been around $30/week. That's for a "full" share - some farms offer half-shares, family shares, and other variations.

What's in a share of course varies, as far as quantity and quality. I'm only really familiar with my own CSA shares over the last while. I aim for an average of 10 items per share. Each item is roughly the same size as what you'd buy as a single unit at a farmers' market, for example, a bunch of beets, a decent size head of broccoli or cauliflower, etc. My rough average price per item at the market is about $3, so that's where the 10 items for $30 comes from.

I don't build in a discount in the share. You'd roughly pay the same buying individual items at the market. I do spend a lot of time and effort in making sure each week there is a fun, useful, varied selection, with greens, root crops, unusual veggies, not the same things every week, and so forth. On a small farm, maintaining that consistent variety, especially with our crazy weather, for 18-20 consecutive weeks, can be quite a lot of extra work, compared to just growing for market!

One other thing, early shares tend to have less in them, so I make up later on. When you see big shares in August and September, they're partly balancing the first 2-3 early season shares that may have had only 6-8 items.

I'm sure there's a fair bit of variation from farm to farm, but I also imagine it's roughly the same across North America.