Alice Groh - CSA Champion
Alice, originally from suburban Chicago, shares how she came to be living on a farm in NH and how she met her husband Trauger Groh, an early pioneer of the Community Supported Agriculture movement.
Community Supported Agriculture is a way for consumers to support an organic/Biodynamic farm so that the farm can provide healthy food for the community and contribute to a balanced environment. By committing to supporting the farm economically, the community shares in the risks of farming.
In the book - Farms of Tomorrow Revisited - Community Supported Farms - Farm Supported Communities by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden (1997), Trauger Groh writes:
We need farms for three reasons: for healthy food, for a healthy environment, and for cultural and educational reasons. In dealing with these needs we have to be aware that they are basic to everyone, and in creating the farms of the future we have to make sure that the needs of all are met. Consequently, three different motivations have to come together to shape the farms of tomorrow:
The first is the basic spiritual motivation: that every year life on earth is created anew, so that human beings can be born safely and have healthy bodies that will allow them to live out their individual and collective spiritual destinies.
The second is a social motivation: to shape our land use with the goal that everyone have access to healthy food, wood and fiber in the right amount and independent of his or her life situation.
The third is the economic motivation that makes all other goals possible, and is the basis of the new farm concept. We must develop the farms of tomorrow in such a way that they regenerate themselves more economically and become more and more diversified, serving as the primary source of food for the local community. This diversity and regeneration should arise with the help of the forces of nature inside the farm organism so that it becomes less and less necessary to introduce into the organism substances and energy from outside such as feed, manures, and fuels, and so that human labor is used as economically as possible. Stated another way, the economic ideal is a farm that achieves and maintains high fertility within itself, generating a surplus of food for the community, and its own seeds for the coming year while the input of outside substances, energies, and labor goes towards zero.
This truly economic motivation should not be confused in any way with the profit motivation. They are totally different categories. Many things we do today in farming are profitable but uneconomic. For example, nowadays strawberries are frequently grown in California for the Northeast market, even when those berries could be grown in the Northeast itself. The grower, the trucker, and the retailer will all eventually make a profit, but there is a hidden loss. The amount of energy expended to grow and transport the strawberries to market far exceeds the amount of energy they will yield when they are consumed. There is a far higher input than output. Ultimately, society must cover this loss in some way. Thus, the profit of a few becomes the loss of many. Production is truly economic when it is done with the lowest possible input of substances, energy, and labor, and when the output exceeds the input. As we enter an era of dwindling resources, many people are recognizing the need for the farms of tomorrow to be truly economic: to renew themselves while creating a consumable surplus without the input of substances from off the farm, and with a reasonable expenditure of labor and energy. (pp.12-13)
Alice Groh was instrumental in helping to start the Temple-Wilton, New Hampshire Community Supported Agriculture with Trauger Groh, as well as with Anthony Graham and Lincoln Geiger. The Temple-Wilton CSA has now flourished for 38 years years and has good prospects for a strong future. Trauger passed away in 2016, but Alice Groh has continued to be a part of the Temple-Wilton CSA and continues to live on the Groh Farm.
EW: Thank you, Alice, for being willing to speak about your life and your involvement in the Temple-Wilton CSA. I understand that you were born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. How did you end up in a farming community in New Hampshire?
AG: Yes, I grew up in the suburbs north of Chicago in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. I had ambitions to live some kind of ‘back to the land’ lifestyle, but I also felt an underlying anxiety because of the time we were in and because I had no background or training in any skills that might help me in this direction. I grew up in a culturally but not particularly religous Jewish family. I got messages from a lot of sides - the world was not as rosy as it looked and as it was presented to us as children in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. We were starting to be shown the liberation films from the Holocaust. We saw pictures of skeletons and of starving people. I read The Diary of Anne Frank. The message I absorbed was: “Be careful, they might be coming to get you.” When I was in 2nd or 3 grade, we experienced the Bay of Pigs crisis under President Kennedy. We heard about the threat of nuclear war and about bomb shelters. At school, we practiced getting under our desks. It seemed like a horrible joke. I got the sense that things were not all right. As a teenager, I experienced the Viet Nam war. I was the younger one among my group of friends who asked questions of the older generation: “What are you guys doing? Why are you having such a horrible, horrible war?” There was a chance that my sister’s boyfriend might be drafted. We were fed up and we wanted something different. I was searching for answers about the meaning of life and how to live in the world. At one point, I overheard two friends in my sister’s class - both older than me - talking about a trip that their Drama Class had taken to Stonehenge in England. And later, in the fabric section of a department store, these same friends of mine heard a strange old woman talking about the meaning of colours. My reaction was: “You have to tell me everything you know about this!”
These friends, or one in particular, knew about an occult bookstore in a seedy part of Chicago. The young man in the book store had dark hair and a moustache. Behind a beaded curtain someone gave readings. At one point this young man handed me two books at the same time - Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner and The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception by Max Heindel. Eventually, I came to regard Heindel’s work as a watered down version of Rudolf Steiner’s Occult Science, which I read later.
My sister graduated and went off to the University of Wisconsin - two and a half hours away. I would drive there to visit her. There was a Free University and my sister took some astrology classes from a man who also ran an interesting bookstore: Richard Koepsel’s - The Macrocosmic Book Shop. Koepsel had the usual array of Western occult material but also Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the Gospel of St John and a small selection of other Steiner lectures. I was 17 years old at the time.
Listening in to what people were talking about, I heard about a Steiner School on Long Island. Because I had read novels such as Zanoni, I thought this Steiner School was a place where people were walking around in white robes and got initiated. I found out later that this Steiner School was a Waldorf elementary and high school for children and adolescents! At this point, I had no idea about any of the so-called Daughter Movements that came out of Steiner’s Anthroposophy, names such as Waldorf Education, Biodynamic Agriculture, medicine, social ideas, etc.
I went to Santa Cruz University. After my first year there, I took some time off. During this time, I was told about a guy at the student farm at US Santa Cruz who had taken a course in England about a certain form of organic agriculture and that the course was given at a place called Emerson College in England which was based on the work of Rudolf Steiner (“whoever he was”). But I knew who Rudolf Steiner was. At that moment, I felt something shift in my head. I said to myself: “I’m going to that course.” I had not known that Rudolf Steiner had said anything about agriculture. I only knew about his self-development and esoteric training writings. It seemed too good to be true! I knew I had to go there.
I found out later that my second cousin had just gone to Emerson College, but I did not know that at the time. The first night I was there, I went up to the library and pulled a book randomly off the shelf. The title was: Nine Lectures On Bees by Rudolf Steiner. I burst into tears! I was thinking: “Finally here is someone who can explain the world to me!” I felt that no one with whom I had grown up knew or understood much about the world. Of course, I loved my family and others around me, but I felt that I was needing to know more about the world. At Emerson College - this was 1974-1975 and I was by now 21 years old - I enrolled in the agricultural course. The Agricultural course was led by Dr. Herbert Kopf, a soil scientist from Hohenheim University in Germany. Dr. Koepf led us through Rudolf Steiner’s Agricultural Course, a series of lectures delivered to farmers in 1924 in what is now Poland. I also met several other significant people whom I felt I needed to meet.
After my time at Emerson, I returned to Santa Cruz, where I was granted credits for my courses at Emerson College. I chose to do a joint major in environmental and religious studies. At that point, the penny dropped for me- the university could do a course in environmental ethics, exploring the question: What does it mean for us to have dominion/stewardship over the world? What attitudes are helpful? Which attitudes are not helpful?
I finished my undergraduate degree at Santa Cruz and then enrolled at the University of California at Davis where I did my Masters Degree in International Agricultural Development. My classmates had taken part in the Peace Corps and other similar projects, so I had heard about their experiences from them. My minor was in pomology, the study of fruits and their cultivation, but I did not find this study so helpful because I was not so interested in the California style of fruit growing, an environment where vast acres of mostly almonds, walnuts and apricots were cultivated. I did appreciate my classes in horticulture and fruit physiology, however.
After Davis, I went back to Emerson College where I was introduced to a young German man who got me a job at a research institution in Heidelberg, Germany - the Research Institute for International Agricultural Development. I was sent to do research for a potential future project in Ghana, West Africa. While there, I got quite ill so I decided that eventually I needed to move back to America and find a community there.
That is how, in 1979, I ended up in the Wilton community in New Hampshire. After I lived there a few years, I had decided to buy my own 27 acre farm. That was in 1984, just fifteen days before I met Trauger Groh.
Trauger Groh had grown up in Germany and had been farming there for many years. He was one of the initiators of a community farm east of Hamburg. In October, 1984, he was invited to speak in the US by a couple who had visited Trauger in Germany because they were interested in new social forms. Trauger was to be the main speaker at a conference in Ithaca, New York, but prior to that conference, he visited our community in Temple -Wilton, New Hampshire to give some lectures on biodynamics at the Wilton Waldorf School and other local places. By that time, Trauger was already divorced. He and his first wife had been married for twenty three years and had four daughters. However, they had separated in 1981 and some years later they were divorced.
I happened to be the one who gave Trauger a tour of the Wilton area. After his lectures, I was able to see him again because he drove up to Canada to visit a friend. We connected at the Boston airport where we had some time to talk before he flew back to Europe.
After Trauger returned to Germany from his US speaking tour, we knew we would see each other again because I was on the board of the US biodynamic society and I was planning on attending the BD conference at the Gotheanum the following February, in 1985, where Trauger would also be present. During our time apart, we wrote numerous letters to each other. I was also able to introduce Trauger to my parents during Easter, 1985. A year after we first met, we were married in Peterborough, New Hampshire in October 1985.
The question was: How would we survive financially?
While farming in Germany, Trauger had been able to work with the German based GLS bank to finance the Buschberghof Farm he had been a part of for many years. The bank made an arrangement with the thirty families who wanted to support the farm. Each family was given a line of credit which was turned over to the farm families as working capital. Each family also made a personal guarantee of a maximum of 1,000 DM to the bank on behalf of the farmers in case there was a deficit in the budget in any particular budget year. Trauger told me that they only had to call on these guarantees one year, but I don’t know how much they needed to ask from each family. With that 'inner circle' backing, the farm then continued to sell their products in the regular way in their farm store and also to deliver boxes of food through a distribution point at one of the Waldorf Schools in Hamburg.
Three families (not related to each other) worked on the farm together. One of these farmers owned the farm. He took the very courageous move to donate his farmland into a trust. The farm produced a huge range of products: grain, flour, vegetables, baked goods, meat (goose at Christmas), pork. The farm also included the work of special needs individuals for which the German government paid for their welfare. This income supported the farm in its early days. This social therapy program on the farm is still operated by Patricia, Trauger’s youngest daughter from his first marriage, while the farm is run by a group of people who share the work of caring for the cows, growing the grains and vegetables and distributing the products.
In Germany, Trauger had been part of a group that had started a four year training in biodynamic agriculture. This training is still ongoing. It is very thorough. The students meet once a month to look at the flora, fauna and working structure of the farm they are visiting, discussing the problems. Once these people have finished their training, they are very much in demand.
However, here in the US, the situation was different. For example, there was no socially minded bank that would help the thirty families who wanted a biodynamic farm. But here were people in the community who wanted access to locally grown biodynamic food, including vegetables and dairy products. A meeting was called of the approximately thirty families who wanted to support a farm. Trauger told them: “You need to want the farm, not just the produce. And in order to have a farm, you need to support the budget of the farm.” The idea was that the farmers would calculate what they needed in terms of seeds, soil, money for themselves (very little). And then the families who wanted a farm in their community were asked to make pledges. We didn’t care about the size of each pledge as long as we met our budget.
The following spring, working with two other farmers - Anthony Graham and Lincoln Geiger - the concept of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was born on the Temple-Wilton Community Farm! Another farm also started that same year on Indian Line Farm led by Robyn van En in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. They also had a kind of CSA that was started that same year - 1985.
Since its inception in 1985 up to the present, the now 100 or so families who want to support the farm in Temple-Wilton gather to pledge their support for the farm’s needs for the upcoming year. The community is presented with a budget which is, as Trauger expressed it is, “a footprint of our intentions. We are going to do this, that, plant these vegetables, take care of the cows in this way. Each line item reflects where we are going to spend money, how we are going to remunerate the workers etc.”
During the meeting, each family’s financial commitment is added up to see if the total budget has been covered. The meeting is not adjourned until the upcoming budget has been met. If there is a shortfall of pledges, the community of families is asked to resubmit their pledges and the process is repeated until the budget is met.
EW: Was it a lot of work to create a budget?
AG: Trauger had a lot of experience. Now we send out the budget by email and then at an in-person meeting we ask for pledges. Before, we used to do it out loud at a meeting. Most people payed on a monthly basis. We still have our meeting in April. Now there are 100 families. We have a pot luck afterwards. We hear from the farmers what is going on - what is new this year. Now people write their pledges on a piece of paper. While everyone is sitting there, we add it up. If there is a shortfall, we ask people to pledge more. We approximate what some additional salable goods like cheese and yoghurt will bring in. We are also considering grants. Before, we were only budgeting the running costs. Now, we are fundraising for capital costs. People were encouraged by Trauger to feel responsible for where our food is coming from. Our farm store is stocked on Tuesdays and Saturdays. We do not prepare boxes for the members. I said: “I am not going to pack boxes. Come and take what you want.” Sometimes our diligent farmer will write notes saying: one cauliflower head per family.”
It has worked since 1986. Members can come when they want and take what they want, with limitations that Anthony, our current farmer, stipulates. Members don’t volunteer on the farm. We found that it is too much work to have volunteers. Anthony has been there the whole time. A young farmer might take over.
EW: Do you supply vegetables all through the year?
AG: Yes, we supply vegetables all through the year. In the winter, this consists of the winter storable vegetables like onions, carrots, beets, parsnips, turnips, kale etc.. Milk, yoghurt, cheese and occasionally meat are available all year.
EW: How are you handling succession?
AG: We are thinking about succession. One current farmer is in his seventies. Trauger was in his seventies when he stepped back. We do have a solid farmer now who is in his thirties who might be able to take over. Our dairy man is in his sixties, but he has an apprentice. Our cheesemaker is in his forties.
EW: How did Trauger and Steven MacFadden come to write Farms of Tomorrow?
AG: So many questions about community supported agriculture were asked by community members and farmers in the USA and Canada that, to address these questions, Trauger and his neighbour journalist Steven MacFadden wrote Farms of Tomorrow in 1989. In this book, which they updated in 1997, they spoke about the importance of local, biodynamic farms to the local communities and the importance of communities supporting these farms. They included much practical advice for any community that wants to start a community supported farm, including interviews with farmers who reported how their work was progressing.
EW: Alice, I am so thankful that you were willing to share some of your experiences with us here. Thank you!
