I joined a CSA this year for the first time. CSA stands for community supported agriculture. Individuals can buy shares from a farmer and in return they get vegetables every week throughout the growing season. It’s almost like paying a farmer to grow your vegetables, and it’s a great way to get fresh local produce all summer and fall. The shareholders receive seasonal vegetables – those ready to be picked each week. The CSA concept began in Europe and Asia in the 1960’s. The movement was brought to the U.S. in 1984 by Jan VanderTuin. Today there are reported to be over 12,000 CSAs in the U.S.

I’ll pick up my first veggies at the end of the month, and I’m excited to see what I’ll get in my box. I joined a CSA for two main reasons. First, I’m a very poor gardener. Every year I plan to grow some veggies, and every year I fail to be successful. Sure, I’ll get tomatoes and cucumbers from my plants but it’s never that simple. Last year, a groundhog ate everything except the tomatoes and cucumbers which grew out of control. The year before I tried growing from seeds and hardly any plants came up let alone produce any vegetables. One fall, I planted 50 tulip bulbs and only three appeared in the spring. Plus, I don’t really enjoy the daily plant care so I decided to let an expert do the growing for me.

Second, I’m not as big a vegetable eater as I should be, I’m hoping that getting a box of vegetables every week will force me to cook more vegetables and experiment with varieties I would normally not purchase. I have to admit that I’m intimidated by most vegetables more exotic than peas and green beans, but I’m going to do my best to utilize everything I can.

CSAs can be a bit of a risk. Shareholders pay their money up front and rely on the farmer to provide produce. They are expecting a successful farmer – no one would want me in charge of their CSA. Factors not under control of the farmer – weather, insects, infections – can decrease the yield they receive. Most years will be productive but occasionally a bad year will occur. I’m willing to take the risk as I’m proud to support local farmers.

Biographers and historians have written more about Abraham Lincoln than any other American president but never seem to pay much attention to his influence on American agriculture. If they are ever going to recognize his contributions, this would be an appropriate time.

One-hundred fifty years ago in 1862, the 37th Congress passed, and the president signed, three laws of great importance to agriculture. They were an act to establish a Department of Agriculture, the Homestead Act and the Morrill Land-Grant Act. The department did not immediately attain cabinet level status; that came more than two decades later.

It was Lincoln who referred to the Department of Agriculture as “The People’s Department.” He undoubtedly called it that because half of the nation’s people were farmers. Recently the term has been misused by some to try to subordinate the needs of farmers and ranchers.

Before becoming president, Lincoln told a farm audience in Milwaukee, Wis., that farmers were neither better nor worse than other people, and added, “But farmers being the most numerous class, it follows that their interest is the largest interest.”

The Homestead Act to open up the West had been a platform plank of the fledgling Republican Party. It allowed a citizen to file for 160 acres of public land. All he had to do was pay a nominal fee, improve the land and settle there for five years.

The Morrill Act gave the states federal lands to establish land-grant colleges which formed a higher education framework for the nation and became centers of agricultural learning. After the Civil War, the act was extended to the Southern states.

Lincoln was raised on the frontier by parents who had limited success farming. He understood the importance of farmers obtaining knowledge to farm better. In fact, Lincoln thought farming was an ideal occupation for the “combination of labor with cultivated thought.”

“Every blade of grass is a study;” he said, “and to produce two where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.” Those feelings still ring true with farmers today.

If Lincoln needed another reason for the federal government to promote and encourage the success of American agriculture, he could have found it in the disastrous Irish Potato Famine that began in the summer of 1845. A million Irish died from the famine and millions more emigrated, many to America and Lincoln’s home state of Illinois.

The Irish famine may have impressed upon the president and other political leaders of his day the importance of having a stable, diverse food supply and the knowledge to produce enough food for a rapidly growing nation.

In any event, the laws signed 150 years ago transformed American agriculture, setting it on a course to become the envy of the rest of the world. It is only because Lincoln’s legacy is so large that we seldom recognize this part of it.