Our Current Initiatives

 

As farmers, we produce healthy, delicious food and we know the real value of our labor. We spend our scarce free time advancing programs and advocating for policy supporting sustainable food systems. A sustainable food system is one that both works to recognize the value of our hard work and to provision all people with nutrient-rich food. Small-scale, regenerative farming honors access to healthy food as a human right while benefiting from the ecological diversity of holistic management.

While we work toward system change, we do what we can within our own farms and communities, here and now. Please join us both in the short and long term struggle. Below are a few ways we are working to challenge food apartheid:

 

  • Mutual Aid Distributions

    CAA fundraises to buy food from our partner farms in order to donate to mutual aid groups in our food shed (Catskills, Hudson Valley, and NYC). We partner with each group to establish a budget so that they might order as they please from our wholesale list for weekly distributions.

    While our communities are still struggling with the ongoing repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsidies for food justice organizations have ended, it is more important than ever to get nutrient-dense food to our neighbors. Please support our efforts to do so.


    Farm Stands

    In partnership with Nuestra Mesa BK, CAA is supporting local organizers in using our partners' products to connect with people across NYC. At events ranging from mutual aid distributions to autonomous markets, our farm stands help us advocate for our food sovereignty work in communities removed from the Catskills. These stands also allow local organizers to use quality, nutritious food to galvanize our communities to understanding our food systems and how we can make those systems work for us all.

  • West Branch Commons

    CAA works toward equitable land access for historically marginalized communities. Through a partnership with American Farmland Trust and Agrarian Trust, we are facilitating the creation of New York State’s first Agrarian Commons, a C2 (Community Supported Commons) at River Haven Farm, a fourth generation dairy farm in Delancey, NY.

  • Modeling an agroecology-centered farm.

    In keeping with La Via Campesina’s vision to create a network of North-American agroecological peasant farms, Star Route Farm continues to grow food for the people, while learning to listen to the land.

  • Community Supported Agriculture

    The 607 CSA is the backbone of this organization. The shares members buy not only keep farming viable in the Catskills by creating access to a market for participating small family farms; but also, in so doing, help support the trucking infrastructure all of our mutual aid donations and farm-to-institution work relies on.

    Wholesale
    The relationships we’ve formed with the chefs, grocers, and bakers we work with have developed into our most meaningful friendships. It’s all about the food.

    Farm-to-Institution
    We happily accept the risk and additional requirements associated with institutional buying so that we might supply our neighbors’ children with tasty, healthy food grown right here in the Catskills. We are especially grateful to be working with the younger generation of Amish Farmers in our region willing to work with us to establish a market for their organic produce ventures.

 

The 607 CSA

The 607 CSA is a multi-farm CSA based in the Northern Catskills of New York State. We offer abundant and diverse veggie shares sourced from our four collaborating vegetable farms, plus season-long add-ons of pastured meat, eggs, dairy, and other items from 40+ neighboring farms and food businesses. In effect, we are a whole-diet CSA.

Star Route Farm

As a farm with a social justice mission, Star Route seeks to begin addressing systemic food inequities by

  • farming with integrity and responsibility to both land and people in order to

  • grow nutritious food,

  • so that we might distribute free produce to those who are food insecure

  • all the while, collaborating with the communities we grow for to ensure we grow culturally relevant food.

With this mission, we aim to donate 70%-100% of our vegetables and grains to food-relief groups in 2022!