CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It is one of the most direct relationships between our farm and our customers. When you join our CSA Program, you are helping to support our farm, and in return, you get a weekly “share” of in-season produce and other farm products. Your membership fee helps the farmer to do things like buy seeds and fertilizer, fuel their tractors, and pay employees for their hard work planting and harvesting. When its working capital comes directly from its customers, the farm is less dependent on bank loans to help cover the costs of farming in the early season.

We offer a Main season CSA which goes from May until September or November, depending on which option you choose.

At signup, you’ll choose your pickup location and pickup day, or you can choose to have your share delivered. We offer multiple pickup days at each location but we ask that you stick to your selected day, or notify us by Tuesday if you need to change it for a given week, or permanently. Here are a list of available options:

Amagansett Farm Stand, 293 Town Lane, Amagansett, NY 11930: Thursday 2-6 pm, Friday 12-4 pm, Saturday 12-4 pm

Balsam Farms Montauk Market 662 Montauk Hwy, Montauk, NY 11954: Friday 2-4 pm, Saturday 2-4 pm

Delivery: Friday 9:30-5, depending on your delivery area. We’ll notify you of a more narrow time window before delivery, and the delivery schedule is typically similar week-to-week so you’ll know what to expect once the delivery season starts.

We grow hundreds of vegetable varieties and work hard to make each week’s share fresh, seasonal, and exciting. Over the course of the season, you’ll experience the natural progression of the harvest and enjoy vegetables at their peak flavor.

Partial shares typically include 5–6 items. For example: red fingerling potatoes, a yellow onion, Italian eggplant, a pint of Sungold tomatoes, a bag of mesclun mix, and a bunch of basil. Partial shares are ideal for individuals or smaller households who enjoy cooking with fresh vegetables but prefer a lighter weekly quantity.

Full shares include 6–8 core items, plus access to 3–5 optional bonus items each week. Full share members receive everything in the partial share, plus additional items such as a bunch of Easter Egg radishes and a quart of shishito peppers. Optional bonuses may include extra produce like sweet corn, zucchini, green beans, or lettuce, depending on the week’s harvest.

If you love cooking and eating vegetables, you may use your entire share in just a few days. If you eat out often or cook vegetables more sparingly, a partial share may be a better fit. We created the partial share option in response to member feedback, making it easier for everyone to enjoy their share without waste.

California style or à la carte CSA Programs offer a less structured style of CSA. They are a kind of pay-as-you-go program, allowing you to decide when you pick up and what goes into your share.

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, we encourage you to check out our Balsam Farms Gift Cards. They can be used to purchase anything we sell at our Farm Stand and farmer’s markets, and can be a great alternative to our CSA Program. If Membership isn’t quite right for you, but you’d still like to support the farm and save money on food, our Gift Cards are a flexible way for you to receive some of the benefits of our CSA Program without becoming a Member. Similar to our CSA Program, our Gift Cards provide greater value than the cost of purchase. It’s our way of thanking you for paying in advance, and the more you spend the more you save! Gift Cards can be purchased through our website or in season at our Farm Stand or Montauk Market.

Diversity is important at Balsam Farms. We’re fortunate to farm in the growing region that we do, as it affords us the ability to grow a wide variety of crops all season long, many of which you won’t find in grocery stores. Trying new things is part of what being in a CSA Program is all about, and we encourage you to try everything we grow! Each week we’ll include recipes to help you make the most of your share and any vegetables you might not be so familiar with. If you are on a restricted diet, or we include something that truly doesn’t agree with you, you may choose to leave it behind.

Our farm is a very busy place! We harvest daily to supply our Farm Stand, Montauk Market, farmer’s markets, many local restaurants and food pantries, as well as our CSA Members with the freshest available produce. It’s a lot to keep track of! We carefully plan our harvests well ahead of time to make sure we have enough to go around. As such, substitutions are not included with your CSA share.

We plan our harvests with you in mind! As such, we ask that you stick to the pickup day of your choice for the duration of your Membership. If for any reason you need to change your pickup day, or if you will miss a pickup, please contact us and we will do our best to accommodate. We may be able to arrange for you to pick up your share on another one of our designated CSA pickup days during the same week, or you may choose to have a friend pick up your share for you. The week’s share cannot be picked up after 4pm on Saturday.

Prices vary depending on the options you choose. Once you begin choosing your options, prices will be calculated automatically.

Although the value of your weekly share will vary slightly, the items included in your share over the course of the season will have a retail value far greater than the cost of your Membership fee.

We also offer our Members a 10% discount off any additional fresh produce purchased during their CSA pickup time.

Fresher food, open spaces, strengthened local economy, and a thriving agricultural community, just to name a few!

When you buy from local farmers instead of grocery stores, your food is noticeably fresher. It’s been grown right in your neighborhood by your neighbors, and hasn’t spent days on the back of a truck from another state, or passed through warehouses and distribution centers to get to you. Fresher food is better for you, as it retains more of its nutrients and flavor.

When you buy local you also help build a stronger local economy, as more of your dollars stay in the community, instead of going into big corporations’ bank accounts.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits is the relationship you have with your food and the farmers that grow it. We believe knowing the farms and farmers that grow the food you feed your family has great value. It allows you to know where your food comes from and how it’s grown, and you can talk openly with your farmers about any questions you have and learn the story behind your food.

When local farms and farmers are supported by their communities, we all reap the benefits. Having working farms in the community provides food and work for friends, neighbors, and visitors, and provides the beautiful open spaces that make us all proud to call the East End our home.

While Balsam Farms is not a certified organic farm, we do grow all our produce, with the exception of our sweet corn and decorative pumpkins, in accordance with organic principles. That means taking care of our soils and using amendments that have been approved for organic production by the Organic Materials Review Institute.

Our sweet corn is the only conventionally grown crop we grow, in fields separate from the rest of our crops. We do not grow any genetically engineered (GE) or genetically modified (GMO) crops at all, including our corn varieties.

In addition to the crops we grow, we are proud to partner with other quality local growers like Briermere Farms in Riverhead and The Milk Pail in Watermill to provide you a wide selection of the East End’s finest seasonal fruits like berries, peaches, nectarines, apples, pears, and more. While most of these crops are not grown organically, they are grown conscientiously with no excessive spraying, and sometimes none at all. After all, it requires valuable resources like time and money to spray, and no farmer wants to do it more often than is absolutely necessary. We stand by the quality and safety of all the produce we sell that is grown on other farms. If we didn’t have full confidence in these growers, we wouldn’t offer their produce.

Most of the produce grown on our farm is washed or rinsed, but we do encourage our customers to wash it again before consumption. We do our best to make sure your food is free from any foreign matter like excess soil, weeds, and insects, but we’re only human, and occasionally some things slip past us. We encourage you to inspect your food prior to purchase and at home. If you do happen to find a little dirt, consider it a feature of the authenticity of your food!

Unfortunately, we do not offer any pick-your-own harvesting. Much of the land we farm is leased to us by private landowners or preservation trusts. As such, we cannot invite the public into our fields for safety and legal reasons.