The concept of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was brought to the United States by Jan VanderTuin from Switzerland in 1984. Projects in Europe date to the 1960s, when women’s neighborhood groups approached farmers to develop direct, cooperative relationships between producers and consumers. By 1986 two CSA projects in the United States had delivered harvest shares from Robyn Van En's Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts and the Temple/Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire.  Robyn Van En is one of the first early pioneers to blaze the CSA development in the United States.  For several years the concept was reported in various media sources as being started in Japan because a group of women were disturbed that there food had been produced with pesticides.  This unfortunatly is a myth, since the real development of CSA's as we know them were brought to America by Jan VanderTruin and first adopted by Robyn Van En.  The actual CSA model was a culmination of ideas that started in Europe as early as 1920 and later were modified after the Second World War until it began at Robyn Van En's farm in Massetchusetts in 1984.

Since that early development in America, CSA's started to catch on in the farming community over the last 24 years and as many as 1800 farms nationwide are classified as a CSA.

In basic terms, CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.   There are two types of CSA's; Shareholder and Subscription.  The first type, the CSA shareholders own  the farm, have labor requirements and pay the farmer a salary in return for the products.  The second type is subscription, which the shareholder subscribes for a share of the products at a predetermined price before the crops are produced.  (Over 75% of all CSA's are subscription)