Costs keep going up for One Straw Farm in Baltimore County: fuel, labor, boxes for the harvested vegetables. But the price wholesalers pay for that produce doesn't always rise at the same pace - sometimes, in fact, it goes down.
Such depressingly simple math has doomed family farm after family farm. But this particular farm in White Hall is part of a global movement that changes the equation, cutting out the long line of middlemen between producers and food shoppers.
One Straw Farm doesn't even have to get bank loans anymore, thanks to eight years of "community-supported agriculture."
Called CSA for short, the idea works like this: Farms sell shares to consumers at a price that won't leave them high and dry, and get the money upfront. Customers in turn get fresh provisions every week during the growing season.
Wholesale just can't compare financially, said Joan Norman, who owns One Straw Farm with husband Drew. They still sell to wholesalers along with every other sort of customer - farmer's markets, restaurants, a college cafeteria - but it's the CSA operation that has really flourished. Membership doubled this season to more than 900 people.
"If I don't have to pay [bank interest], then my customers get the benefit," said Norman, whose organic farm charges $525 for a 24-week CSA share - just under $22 a week. "And I'll be here in 10 years: Farming becomes a profitable occupation again."
A few American farmers adopted the idea from overseas in the mid-1980s. Now, the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association estimates, there are more than 1,000 CSA outfits across the country. The state has between 30 and 40, according to the Maryland Cooperative Extension.
It's a natural in the wealthy and highly populated Baltimore-Washington corridor, agriculture experts say.
"We have more opportunity here," said Dale Johnson, a farm management specialist with the Maryland Cooperative Extension at the University of Maryland.
Demand for CSA shares is often higher than the supply.
Jack and Beckie Gurley tried to keep membership around 50 this year at Calvert's Gift Farm in Sparks. The farm is 5 acres, much smaller than the Normans' 175-acre operation, so they can handle only so many shares.
But people keep calling. Jack Gurley figures there's already close to 75 names on their waiting list for next year.
"There has been, I think, a lot of information thrown out in the past few years about local agriculture and supporting your local farm," said Beckie Gurley, whose farm charges $425 for a 25-week share - $17 a week.
R.J. Caulder, owner of the 3-acre Breezy Willow Farm in western Howard County, went from 12 customers her first year, in 2004, to 72 last year. No advertising, just word of mouth.
"Some people were coming from almost an hour away," she said.
She stopped this year, expecting to move to North Carolina, but a change in family plans means she'll stay in town and reopen the next growing season.
Some CSA operations have customers pick up their weekly box of food on the farm. Some deliver to drop-off points around the area. Many allow clients to split their shares with friends so they're not overwhelmed with produce - One Straw Farm's 900-plus customers have 650 shares among them.
It can be an adjustment, investing in a farm for the season. You don't shop for the meals you want to make, you make the meals out of whatever's in your box of produce. Early in the summer, that may be more greens than you ever thought you'd eat.
But it's also an introduction to a way of life from which many Americans are several generations removed.
"See the brown chickens?" Lynn Williams of Westminster asked her daughters, ages 4 and 5, as they crouched beside one of the pens at Calvert's Gift Farm last week. "Do you think chickens would be fun pets?"
"That's why I want to live on a farm," declared 5-year-old Sydney.
Williams isn't a shareholder. A vacationing member is a friend of hers, so her family got to enjoy a trip to the farm and a week's worth of produce. If the drive weren't so long, Williams said, she'd get on the list to join.
After a peek at the chickens and horses, the family ventured into the storage barn, the aroma of garlic wafting down from the rafters where clumps of bulbs hung.
They learned that they could pick blackberries fresh off a nearby bush if they wanted to - they did - and meanwhile their box of pre-harvested items was waiting for them: brown eggs, yellow fin potatoes, an eggplant, a cucumber and several other varieties of produce that were not what Williams is used to seeing in the store. The roundish, greenish something-or-other proved to be a type of zucchini called French courgette.
The Gurleys, aware that customers could end up overwhelmed, e-mail shareholders each week with a list of the produce to expect and give them a recipe book at the beginning of the season.
Leana Pitkevits, in her first year with the CSA at One Straw Farm, has become adept at finding uses for greens - she even experimented with a recipe for kale chips.
For Pitkevits, her half-share is a way to make a difference, a chance to help keep a farm a farm rather than a strip mall or a housing development.
As it turns out, she's ended up saving time and money, too.
Because she organized a drop-off at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she works, the food comes right to her - for less than it costs her to pick it up at her grocery store in Canton.
"It's been a great experience," Pitkevits said.
jamie.smith.hopkins@baltsun.com