by Eric Richard

A few posts ago, Josh asked a really great question: What is the value of joining the CSA?

Not some theoretical soft value about the environmental effects of buying local food or supporting the local economy, but the bottom line effect on our budget. Does this save money or not?

I think it was a great question and deserves very thoughtful consideration.

To that end, I will endeavor to collect enough information to try to answer the question by the end of this CSA season.

In particular, there are two pieces of data that my wife and I will be collecting and reporting on throughout the year.

Method #1: Computing “Real Value” of the Food

One way of computing the value of joining the CSA is to look at the “real value” of the food we are getting and comparing that against the actual cost of joining the CSA.

Therefore, each week, when we get a distribution, we will put the following information into a spreadsheet we are keeping:

• The amount of each type of food that we got in that distribution (e.g., 1 lb of broccoli, 2 quarts of strawberries, etc.)
• A reasonable representation of the “market value” of that food.

In order to compute the market value of the food, each week we will go to the website of a local grocery store and record the price that we would have paid for this food.

We are expecting to run into some problems with this experiment. For example, it is quite possible that we will get food distributed to us that is not available at the store. Or it will be difficult to get prices on the exact variety of lettuce or tomatoes or whatever.

In addition, we have already run into questions about whether we should record the price for the organic variety of food or the non-organic variety. Given that we didn’t choose the CSA because it is organic, we are not going to factor this into the “real value” — when we lookup prices, we will use the non-organic foods when possible.

Our suspicion is while this will be an inaccurate science, it should give a reasonable approximation of the real value of the food.

At the end of the season, we will add up all of the cost and report on how much “value” we got out of the CSA. Did we get more or less out of this than we paid?

Method #2: Computing Actual Impact on Money Spent

The first method is useful at determining how much the food is worth. But, nothing says that we will get the full value out of this food or that, outside of the CSA, we would have bought this same food.

For example, maybe over the course of the season, we get a bunch of food that we just don’t like or enjoy. While it is fair to say that this should be computed in our “real value” calculations, it isn’t obvious that this is a practical way of looking at the impact of this on our budget.

Therefore, we will also be looking at a much more realistic metric as well.

Through our records in Quicken, I can get a pretty reasonable estimate for the amount of money that we spent on groceries and restaurants from June 2006 - October 2006.

Once the season is over, I will compare that amount to the amount of money that we spent on the CSA membership, groceries, and restaurants from June 2007 - October 2007.

There are a couple of interesting statistics to watch here:

• Did we spend more or less money on these categories this year compared to last year?
• How did the allocations shift? Did we see a big change in where money was spent?

I don’t have a really good feel for the first answer, but my gut answer is that we will see a pretty dramatic decrease in restaurant spending and my general feel is that this will more than offset the spending on the CSA and groceries.

It is my belief that there are no other substantial factors that would affect this comparison. (In fact, as a control, I might be able to do a comparison of January 2006 - May 2006 and January 2007 - May 2007 to see if they were comparable.)

Therefore, this year-to-year comparison should pretty accurately reflect changes due to membership in the CSA.