Another way to procure organic produce eliminates the middleman entirely.

It’s called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and the concept is simple: You join a group that supports a local organic or sustainable farm by agreeing to pay for the farmer’s produce in advance; you then receive weekly deliveries of the freshest food possible directly from the farm to your door.

The money and farm jobs are kept in the community. There’s no overhead flowing out to maintain bricks-and-mortar supermarkets and all the expenses they incur. Nothing flows out of the community to far-away companies that may be owned by large agribusiness corporations; possible exploitation of foreign farmers is completely eliminated.

A variation in the Community Supported Agriculture idea is a service that takes your orders for organic food and fills them for you by gathering your requested items from local farmers, then delivers the order to your door. One such service is Planet Organics of San Francisco, voted the best produce delivery service in the Bay Area by readers of San Francisco magazine.

Owned by Larry Bearg, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and Lorene Reed, a mental health counselor and licensed cosmetologist, Planet Organics touches the community in several positive ways. First, it supports local organic farmers. The service insures that produce is handled as little as possible as it is quickly consolidated into orders for delivery. Instead of 100 families making 100 round trips to the market for their groceries, one or two Planet Organics delivery trucks make long loops around the route, saving gas and oil.

Subscribers plan their shopping lists online at the service’s web site using the site’s “Build Your Own Box” feature. The service has instituted a scrip program that donates six percent of sales to designated schools and nonprofit organizations. It has also initiated a program that donates thousands of pounds of organic food each year to the San Francisco Food Bank to assist the needy. A number of these proxy-shopping services have sprung up in the United States in the recent past.

If you visit vividpicture.net, you’ll find a web site devoted to nothing less than the transformation of the entire state of California’s food industry toward a sustainable system. It’s a project of the Roots of Change Fund (http://www.rocfund.org), a collaborative of foundations and leading experts that supports the transition to a healthier food system and healthier environment in California. The organic infrastructure is growing strongly, but without much coordination. The Vivid Picture project aims to give an overall direction and impetus to the changes going on.