Castanea Collective isn’t your typical farm. For starters, the Peterborough-based collective is a CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture.

Kevin Karl, one of three founders of Castanea, says a lot of these types of farms are relatively anonymous these days. However, his collective stays closer to the concept’s roots.

“They can just be kind of like a vegetable delivery service and you never really have that interaction with the farmer or really get the sense of what’s going on in the fields,” he says of today’s CSAs.

“I think it’s important to try to get people out there so that they can see what’s going on, have a connection with the seasons, and have a stronger sense of where their food is coming from.”

Each week, members of Castanea Collective receive a basket of vegetables that change depending on the season.

“With a CSA, you’re going on a seasonal eating adventure and it’s a way to strengthen that connection,” adds co-founder Russell Vinegar.

“You can’t be part of a CSA and be totally ignorant about what it is you’re eating and how the seasons work because you’re going to be talking to us every week.”

Vinegar and Karl met at McGill University where they studied agriculture and environmental sciences. While at university, the duo, along with a third friend, Sebastian Belliard, were already brainstorming projects they could collaborate on.

“The ball was rolling with ideas of what we could do, what our common interests were and just keeping an eye out for opportunities for land,” Vinegar says. “I guess this was just the right time, the right place and here we are.”

It all started last year when Karl, who had already worked on Brazilian and American farms, returned to Canada to take a course in Peterborough. He invited Vinegar and Belliard to launch a farm and together they connected with John Nicholson, a local musician and landowner. 

“He’s been waiting for someone to do something interesting with the land, or something that he felt good about,” Vinegar says. “He turned down some conventional farmers in the area looking to rent it over the years and it was only in December that we were really connected with him and lined that up. It’s left us with lots of work.”

The challenges are practically endless because they’re working on land that hasn’t been farmed before, the trio needs to develop the entire infrastructure, plan the irrigation strategy, etc. They even had to build their own greenhouse. “We’re coming at it pretty much from scratch,” Vinegar says.

He adds that a Birthright trip last year – where he got to visit a kosher winery – inspired him to introduce Jewish principles into his farming, including the concept of shmittah.

“The underlying principle is giving the land time to rest and restore, and maintain its fertility,” he says. “For us, that’s making sure that you’re rotating where you’re growing – that you’re not growing the same thing in the same place every year. [This prevents] diseases [because] you’re not drawing the same nutrients.”

Karl says they’ve also borrowed a social action concept from Judaism. He points to a passage in the Torah that says when you harvest, you should leave the edges and the corners for the less fortunate.

“Often, the price makes [food like this] inaccessible for a lot of people,” he says. “A lot of what we’re trying to do is to figure out how we can meet people where they are, how we can make the food as accessible as possible.”

In response to that the trio has introduced a sliding scale, which means members of their CSA can choose three different price points. “We hope that people who can pay at the higher end do and people who can only pay at the lower end do that,” Karl says.

Down the line, the friends hope they can teach people how to integrate food production into their everyday lives. One of their goals is to build up a stock of edible perennials that members can plant in their own backyard.

 “I think our ultimate goal is to establish these long-lived food production orchards that will keep feeding people long after we’ve left,” Karl adds. “That’s one of our driving focuses.”

To learn more about Castanea Collective, visit www.castaneacollective.com.