At this big backyard, boxes of produce feed subscribers

Originally published on December 3, 2008

As he walks along a long row of bulky yet intricate farming equipment, Brenton Johnson excitedly explains how each piece helps him plow, plant and weed the acres he farms just north of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

It's hard to believe that the chattering Johnson, who is usually a soft-spoken man of few words, didn't know much about farm machinery three years ago when he and his wife, Beth, turned their family backyard garden at their house on Holly Street in East Austin into the source for produce they sold at the downtown farmers' market.

Government loans helped the couple purchase the equipment after they bought a 20-acre tract in 2006, but long days of work in the fields and hours of research have taught him how to use it.

Brenton, a former Deadhead and self-described radical environmentalist who even with a few days' worth of facial hair still looks younger than his 36 years, had always tended small gardens for himself. So when he and Beth, his high school sweetheart with whom he reunited 12 years after graduation, started a family, he knew he wanted to grow enough food to feed them, too.

Soon, the couple's backyard garden spilled into the front and side yards of the double lot. In addition to selling the extra produce at the downtown farmers' market, he decided to sell through a community-supported agriculture program, in which subscribers pay for boxes of produce delivered each week to a pickup location in the city.

By January 2007, with the acreage by the airport cultivated and just in time for the birth of their son Jim, they were sending out CSA boxes to hundreds of subscribers from the new farm.

The Johnsons started with 10 subscribers at the Holly Street garden and now have about 450, with almost as many on a waiting list. Long waiting lists are common for CSAs, and the Johnsons are hoping that by increasing their production acres next year, they will be able to quickly add subscribers.

One of the first things Brenton Johnson did was set up a newsletter that is e-mailed to subscribers. Many farms offer a newsletter as a way to stay in touch with subscribers, to offer tips like how to store your basil or tomatoes and, best of all, recipes for what to do with all those eggplants or peppers or the out-of-the-ordinary vegetables such as kohlrabi or rainbow chard.

Johnson's Backyard Garden, which is the only year-round CSA in Central Texas, is quickly becoming one of the most serious community-supported agriculture programs in the state, if not the country. Brenton aims to have 1,000 subscribers and starting next year, he'll have 45 additional acres and three greenhouses to help him do just that. "A thousand sounds like a lot, but when you think about all the people in Austin, it's not that much," he says.

Brenton isn't shy about getting advice from the handful of programs that already have more than 1,000 subscribers, including Angelic Organics near Chicago, Roxbury Farm in New York's Hudson Valley and Harmony Valley outside Madison, Wis.

Community-supported agriculture programs came about in the mid-1960s in Japan and Europe. They first appeared in the U.S. in the mid-'80s at two farms in the Northeast, and now there are more than 1,200 farms with a CSA-like structure.

As with most CSA farms, Johnson's Backyard Garden lets subscribers work in exchange for boxes of produce. Dozens of people show up on Wednesdays and Saturdays to help harvest the fields and put together boxes. Six full-time workers help oversee a handful of farm interns.

Fulfilling wanderlust and a need for change, most interns work for several months at a time in exchange for housing and food, sometimes money, but mainly experience. Teaching round after round of new interns takes a lot of Brenton's time and energy, but he knows its value and, as a businessman, knows the farm needs eager hands.

"Ideally, I'd love to have a paid harvest crew," he says, "because the skill (to farm) has to grow."

Bess Steiner, a former landscape architect who recently moved to Austin from Seattle to intern on the farm, says she is working there to learn enough to one day start her own CSA. With a CSA, you have more security about food, where it's raised, what's in it, how it's grown and who is growing it, she says. Back in Seattle, Steiner says she was able to live off her CSA box; she only had to buy milk, eggs and cheese. (For this reason, many CSA farms are starting to provide options for add-ons such as eggs, milk and coffee from outside sources.)