Not since the early days of the pandemic in 2020 has Emma Jagoz’s Moon Valley Farm seen so many people buying food locally.

About twice as many customers have signed up for her Woodsboro farm’s community-supported agriculture program this season compared to last year. And she’s not the only one seeing numbers rise.

Often referred to as a CSA, the offering allows Jagoz to sell her crops directly to consumers who pay a weekly or bi-weekly subscription for a box of fruits and vegetables. For customers spanning from Frederick County to Baltimore, that means paying anywhere between $35 and $82 for a haul of local produce consistently delivered to their door. The model has provided farmers like Jagoz with the revenue to buoy their farms through periods of financial uncertainty. They believe that same hunger for personal stability is what’s currently boosting CSAs’ popularity.

“Tariffs are up and then they’re down,” Jagoz said. “It’s creating this lack of security for people.”

Jagoz, who has over 1,200 subscribing customers, hired an extra customer service representative to manage inquiries. She said the last few months have been a public “wake-up call” — from a nationwide egg shortage to funding cuts over food safety — that is revealing the fragility of the country’s food system and making consumers think local.

“We don’t have full data yet this season about how many farms in our coalition have sold out all of their shares,” said Sadie Willis, network coordinator for FairShare CSA Coalition, a Wisconsin nonprofit that works with farmers across the country looking to start their own CSAs. “But we anecdotally know that many are seeing fuller demand for their offerings than in some prior years.”

During the pandemic, CSAs hit their peak in popularity. Many farms felt the sting from shuttered restaurants and markets and turned to the subscription model to keep their businesses alive. There is no official count of CSAs nationwide, but several farmers said in interviews that they believed the number stagnated in the years after lockdown.

“We grew rapidly overnight in the pandemic,” said Rebecca Northrop, sales and procurement director for Cecil County’s Flying Plow Farm. “Now we’ve been ticking up again.”

As of May, her business had nearly 900 customers. CSA consumers traditionally pay a lump sum ahead of harvest for a certain fraction of a farmer’s crops, but Flying Plow Farm has tried a different method to meet the greater demand.

Since 2020, Flying Plow has operated its CSA year-round with offerings beyond the lamb, vegetables, eggs and chicken grown on its property. Subscribers can also get cheeses, flours and vinegars, either imported from neighboring states or through partnerships with local farms. The one-stop shop has prompted some customers to stop grocery shopping altogether, Northop said.

Like Moon Valley, the business allows customers to pay as they go. Large vegetable hauls can run customers as low as $25 or as high as $45 per week. It’s not always cheap for consumers to buy or for farmers to produce.

Bryan Alexander, founder of Good Dog Farm in Baltimore County, said the business has retained customers and saw a 15% uptick in CSA signups in recent months. But he hasn’t found a way for his program to capitalize on the bump in interest to the same degree as the larger Moon Valley and Flying Plow.

“It’s not a code we’ve ever cracked,” Alexander said of his and his wife Joanna’s attempts to scale up the marketing of their produce to new customers and operate software to customize and deliver hauls. “We’ve worked on farms our whole life, so we don’t know much about the digital.”

Recent U.S Department of Agriculture cuts and grant freezes may also affect how accessible it is to start and maintain a CSA, though local resources still exist.

Shoshana Nachman of Baltimore County’s Communitas Farm — Latin for “the spirit of community” — said in March there was more demand for her CSA’s produce than she could satisfy.

Consumers turned to her farm to skirt increasingly volatile food prices since her operation had yet to be impacted by higher costs on imports such as packaging or fertilizer, she said.

Nachman has noticed that customers from across the political spectrum are looking for ways to be more self-sufficient, whether that’s by relying on her harvest or trying to grow their own.

Nachman said it’s “bittersweet” to know that anxiety about food supply can be such a boost to business. Like many in the CSA programs, her customers are often young families.

“We disagree with almost every policy that’s coming out, and if we’re [the country] not paying attention to public health and there’s another crisis, at least we’re well-positioned,” she said.

“We’re in the business of feeding people, and we’ll still be selling food no matter what.”

This article has been updated to correct names in a photo caption.