Community Farm of Ann Arbor
Paul Bantle
1525 S. Fletcher Road
Chelsea, Mich. 48118
(313) 994-9136

You don't have to travel very far west of Ann Arbor to leave the urban area and then the suburbs behind. By the time you turn off the Interstate onto Fletcher Road near the town of Chelsea, even the pavement becomes a thing of the past as Fletcher narrows down to a hard-packed dirt road scattered with gravel, winding between forests and farm fields growing tall with corn on an August afternoon.

Back a narrow drive through a small woods, past Isabel Yingling's house and a red barn, you'll find Paul Bantle and Ann Elder and their four apprentices growing a remarkable variety of fresh, organic produce in neat, thriving rows scattered around a 12-acre farm. It's a demonstration farm, showing off the purported benefits of "biodynamic" agriculture, a farming method that Bantle, chatting while walking along freshly plowed furrows scattering rye and vetch seeds for winter cover, described as "a further refinement on organic farming." It's a technique based on the principles of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who innovated many organic concepts some 70 years ago, encouraging the avoidance of synthetic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, making every farm as nearly complete an ecosystem as possible, recycling its own produce as compost and manure and using herbal preparations to nourish compost and fertilize the fields in a fashion that unites the earth and plants and animals and humans in a community.

This is more than just an organic farm, however: Thriving in its seventh year, it is a well-established model of Community Supported Agriculture, with 110 members who share both the risks and the bounty of farming by purchasing equal shares at the beginning of the growing season, in return for which they receive weekly baskets of produce throughout the farm's 25-week season and, at the end of the harvest in November, a mound of winter root vegetables to see them through the cold months. Advertised by word of mouth and fliers in natural-food stores and co-ops in Ann Arbor, the shareholder program is tailored to make it accessible to poor people as well as the affluent: The $375 annual share (enough to provide all the vegetables that two adults and two children need) may be varied on a voluntary sliding scale in which participants themselves decide whether to give up to $40 more or less than the standard amount depending on their own evaluation of their financial capacity and need -- and it may also be paid, in full or in part, with food stamps. Further, an additional $100 fee may be paid in any of three optional forms: In cash, by volunteering 15 hours in the fields or the farm office, or by selling one's own produce, such as home-baked bread, to other participants.

The Community Farm is at its third leased location in seven years, and organizers hope this will be permanent. Ms. Yingling leases the land to the group in exchange for one share of produce plus the equivalent in cash -- a generous price indeed for 12 acres of prime rural Michigan farmland -- and she plans to deed the property to a land trust so it can be the farm's in perpetuity.

More than 36 crops were growing tall and lush during the almost perfect summer of 1994. Carrots and leeks and tomatoes, winter squash and sweet corn, peppers and zucchini, summer squash and garlic are standing tall, along with neat white beehives, two milk cows, and a new stand of fruit trees planted just this year, donations from local nurseries. They dug a well this year, and the members covered the $3,000 cost with a huge garage sale and quilt auction. That's community gardening. And so is the good news that comes at the end of a bountiful season like last year's, when the total produce, based on retail prices for organic vegetables, would have cost each individual $550 at a co-op store, a substantial return on the $375 investment. The numbers aren't that good every year, it's true. Farming is a risky business, and the summer before, for instance, cool and rainy months reduced the harvest. "You share the farmer's bounty, and you share the farmer's risk," Bantle said. "You can't just be a fair-weather friend and expect it to work out."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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