In May 2025, practitioners from Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiatives traded muddy boots and office work to reflect on the ideals and structures as well as social and economic stability of CSAs. As Stefanie Engelbrecht of the “Superschmelz” CSA notes: “In no other enterprise would you leave organisational development or strategy to chance, yet that’s exactly what happens every day in many CSAs”. Harnessing the insights and experiences of the German CSA Network’s support ecosystem, this article shares lessons to strengthen the resilience of food sovereignty actors, in CSA organisations and beyond.
Why organisational perspectives matter
Global debates about small-scale agriculture often spotlight land access, seed sovereignty, and peasant rights, but the daily reality of CSA leaders gets little attention. Working the fields at dawn, packing food shares at noon, and answering calls from members when it gets dark leaves little room to question roles, internal processes, or long-term strategies. “It’s hard to be strategic when your hair is on fire”, a U.S. practitioner once summarised, a potent reminder of the relentless pressure.
Only through collective learning will organisational resilience become a stronger movement practice
CSAs are not immune to market pressures that entrench inequalities, nor are they free from power hierarchies or unfair working conditions. Yet truly resilient, just, and sustainable agri-food systems require self-reflection as much as advocacy for the broader cause. Examining how food sovereignty actors, including CSAs, farms, agri‑food cooperatives, or processing firms that are engaged and embedded in economic activities, are organised – and how they can be stabilised is also necessary. Without the space for organisational reflection, hidden tensions may deepen, challenges can multiply, and true resilience is thwarted.
Pausing for collective learning
It was precisely to address these organisational questions that twenty participants converged at the Superschmelz CSA in May of 2025. Farmers, coordinators and volunteers convened in an old barn that had been transformed into a seminar space. Warmed by a wood‑fired stove, they were ready for two days away from CSA routine. There was a pleasant atmosphere of connection, and overlaps in terms of challenges and values. Each CSA brought its issues to the table and discussed them openly. It is crucial to note that “every CSA organisation is unique, has its specifics, and not everything is suitable for every CSA”, according to Philip Kosanke, who has been involved in supporting CSA initiatives for over 10 years. The seminar, however, was laid out to make strength out of this diversity, to exchange and learn from each other around topics such as finances, aspects of production and distribution, staff and member management, and even potential cooperative models.
Three types of governance
CSAs are organisations that vary greatly based on region and founding background. Experience shows that organisational governance is a central aspect that can better help to understand an organisation’s configuration. Who makes decisions? How is power shared among founders, farmers, workers, landowners, members, and volunteers? Typically, three governance types emerge in the CSA context:
- Producer-led CSA: farm or farmer holds the reins, deciding how the operation runs, who works there and how long the model will last.
- Cooperative partnership CSA: one or more producers collaborate with a legally organised member corporation on equal footing – while its volunteer or paid board makes the (final) decisions.
- Integrated CSA: farm, management, and membership merge into a single legal entity, most often as an association, and in larger CSAs as a cooperative – hiring people to cultivate and coordinate the community.
These governance choices affect every aspect of the CSA, from member participation to legal forms and land ownership, labour models, size, crop mix, distribution channels, payment options, and more. This came to life for seminar participants at the Superschmelz CSA, as it had navigated extensive organisational change, most notably a multi-year transition process into a cooperative.
Organisational resilience: surfacing blind spots
Even with community financing in place, organisational issues and challenges in CSAs often don’t get the attention they need – especially in smaller ones, as one participant of the CSA seminar highlighted. To root organisational resilience, we must recognise and address such possible organisational tensions. Applying an organisational lens helps CSAs to spot hidden weaknesses before they escalate into crises. At the seminar, participants were introduced to the ‘Trilemma Check’, a hands-on tool that breaks organisational stability into three core dimensions. Here, stability means a CSA’s long‑term capacity to pursue its goals effectively. It hinges on balancing three interconnected dimensions:
- The realisation of (transformative) goals and motivations;
- Social cohesion between producers and consumers, and among consumers themselves; and
- The economic viability of the CSA operation.
Equipped with an indicator set for each dimension, participants can take the tool home and run it in their CSAs. In practice, the Trilemma Check has revealed, for instance, tension between paid staff and volunteers. This often plays out as a balancing act between ‘professional reliability’ and ‘community‑based self‑organisation’, where differing expectations around time, responsibility, and decision‑making structures collide. Addressing tensions early is crucial: if organisational development doesn’t get the attention it needs, everyone feels the strain – and too often, people step back or walk away rather than lean into conflict.
Support ecosystem of the German CSA Network
To support CSAs at every stage of development, the German CSA Network has built a rich toolbox inspired by learning models rooted in global practice. The ‘Stable School’ format, for example, draws from participatory ‘Farmer Field Schools’ in Uganda and Denmark. It brings small peer groups together to visit each other’s farms and learn directly from their organisational setups through collegial consultation. At the Superschmelz seminar, participants tried out the lower-barrier ‘case clinics’. These peer-to-peer sessions paired small groups with members of the Consulting Working Group to reflect on the seminar inputs and apply them to their own CSA realities. The practical exercise was a core element of the seminar and proved effective. As one of the participants proclaimed: “I’m returning to my everyday CSA work with lots of new ideas and concrete tips.”
Applying an organisational lens helps CSAs spot hidden weaknesses before they escalate into crises
These formats complement other offers from the Network, such as a basic course for newcomers, an open-source handbook, and webinars on topics like ‘lean farm management’ and ‘conflict facilitation’. To ensure independence, the Network relies primarily on member fees and donations; initial consultations are free, and further support is arranged individually.
Learnings for food sovereignty practitioners
A key learning from the German CSA Network – whether you lead a CSA, work in an agri‑food cooperative, or coordinate a processing hub or seed network – is to treat organisational learning and development as an ongoing, essential, and open-ended practice. Integrating organisational perspectives can enhance the resilience of food sovereignty actors and their supporting networks as it prepares them for the trials and tribulations of everyday farming and shines a light on obstacles and struggles that can seem so banal that they might otherwise be overlooked. Existing agroecology schools and other educational spaces could more fully integrate organisational aspects to support food sovereignty actors in finding the optimal individual configuration of structures and practices. Of course, the context varies widely. Non‑European approaches that range in organisational design, from community‑based models to social and solidarity economies, offer rich insights into how actors who are struggling for food sovereignty organise. We invite food sovereignty practitioners everywhere to share their organisational challenges, stories, peer learning tools, and lessons; only through collective learning will organisational resilience become a stronger movement practice.
Authors: Matthias Middendorf is a researcher, project manager and educator who conducted research at the University of Giessen and the University of Kassel‑Witzenhausen on food sovereignty and CSA from an organisational perspective. Simon Scholl is a member of the council of the German CSA Network, where he coordinates the working group on CSA cooperatives and serves as a member of the consulting working group. He is a co-founder and member of the board of the CSX Network. Contact: m.middendorf@uni-kassel.de
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to the organisers and participants of the “Resilient Organizational Development in CSAs” seminar at the Superschmelz CSA and our members and colleagues in the various working groups within the German CSA Network. The seminar was part of Germany’s Federal Organic Farming Scheme (BÖL), which is initiated and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Regional Identity. It was hosted by the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL Germany) and the German CSA Network.
Sources
- Middendorf, M., Herzig, C. Food sovereignty at the organizational level: a framework for characterizing the diversity of economic actors. Article in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2025 (free article available for download).
- Middendorf, M., Rommel, M. Understanding the diversity of Community Supported Agriculture: a transdisciplinary framework with empirical evidence from Germany. Article in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2024 (free article available for download).
- Gastinger, M. M., Kraiß, K., Meißner, S., Rommel, M., Middendorf, M., Egli, L. Country Report: GERMANY. in: World CSA Census, International Handbook on Community Supported Agriculture. URGENCI, 2025.
Download pdf
This article is part of Issue 3-2025: Weaving Resilience and Resistance
