Current Status of the Community-Supported Agriculture Model in Poland—Exploring Key Areas of Sustainable Operations

Social innovations responding to the local needs of farmers and consumers
are the subject of recent studies, and their results indicate effectiveness in mitigating the
effects of crises and, in the long run, in building the resilience of local communities to
future challenges. One of the social innovations is the Community-Supported Agriculture
(CSA) model. This article presents the current status of active CSA groups in Poland.
The paper’s main objective is to identify active CSA farms in Poland and then analyse
the individual farms’ CSA offers, the number of people they reach, and their members’
characteristics, motivation, and degree of involvement. As of 2023/2024, when the study
was conducted, 13 food-producing farmers were inventoried for 35 groups, reaching an estimated
1200 people. Taking into account the Polish context and referring to the experience
and examples of CSA communities in Europe and the world, the following conclusions were
drawn: the need to establish an umbrella organisation to network the current CSA community
in Poland and to support the already active farmers through, among other things,
advocacy, education and coordination of CSA model development at the national level.