The 'box scheme' version of CSA, the one tht extension advocates, where crops from various farms are pulled together and delivered to the shareholders would prefer to hire a driver who wasn't associated with ANY of the farms, thereby completing the separation of farmer and consumer. Just like Safeway, eh?
Our county farm development guy pushed a version of this for people doing farmers markets in DC. For whatever reason, it didn't work. We talked about it as a CSA model at several of our county small farmer meetings but couldn't really make it work on a large scale. (there is a CSA in Fredricksburg that is made up of a group of farmers - I don't know how successfully). Over the past several years I have had neighboring farmers grow crops that I didn't have room for or that they specialized in. I don't like it. I can't account to my subscribers for what they are doing. We do an add on fruit share. The fruit is grown by a couple out by Shenandoah park. As Allan implies in his comment, the separation of the farmer from the eater (even once removed like that) isn't all that comfortable. If the subscriber doesn't like a week's apples I can't explain it, I can only say 'I'll check what went wrong with the person that did grow them.'
