ANSWER to WEEK 2 Question

Does anyone know how and why CSAs started? Let's throw in Where? also...

According to Wikipedia:
Community-supported agriculture began in the early 1960s in Germany, Switzerland, and Japan as a response to concerns about food safety and the urbanization of agricultural land. But long before the 1960's concerns about food safety had hit Germany, Switzerland and Japan, even before the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt encouraged Americans to plant victory gardens as a way of doing their part during World War II, President Herbert Hoover introduced people to the idea of relief or sustainable gardens after the stock market crash of 1929. These relief gardens, mainly set up in vacant lots, were a way of feeding hungry people, plus creating jobs for those who had become unemployed. Working in these gardens gave people a feeling of self-worth and usefulness. Although very successful in the early part of the depression, these types of gardens ended in 1935 after President Roosevelt's New Deal Program was adapted and government funding for the relief gardens stopped. However the relief gardens that President Hoover had introduced to the people in the great depression laid the foundation for the victory gardens of WWII. Then in the 1960's groups of consumers and farmers in Europe formed cooperative partnerships to fund farming and pay the full costs of ecologically sound and socially equitable agriculture. In Europe many of the CSA style farms were inspired by the economic ideas of Rudolf Steiner and experiments with community agriculture took place on farms using biodynamic agriculture. In 1965, mothers in Japan concerned about the rise of imported food and the loss of arable land started the first CSA projects, called teikei (提携) in Japanese - most likely unrelated to the developments in Europe.

The idea didn't start to take root in the United States again until sometime in 1984, when Jan VanderTuin brought the concept of CSA to North America from Europe.[1] At the same time, German Biodynamic farmer Trauger Groh, founded with colleagues the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire.[2] Vander Tuin had co-founded a community-supported agricultural project named Topinambur, located near Zurich, Switzerland. Coinage of the term "community-supported agriculture" stems from Vander Tuin and the Great Barrington CSA that he co-founded with Robyn Van En, its proprietor.[citation needed] Since that time, community supported farms have been organized throughout North America, mainly in the Northeast, the Pacific coast, the Upper-Midwest, and Canada. North America now has at least 13,000 CSA farms, 12,549 of them in the US alone (as of 2007), according to the US Department of Agriculture.