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In addition to its robust farmers market scene, Jersey City is also home to several successful cooperative food ventures that enable residents to get fresh and community-based food, including successful CSAs like Downtown Harvest and fledgling enterprises like the Jersey City Food Coop Initiative.

Now another option for small-scale, regional eating is coming to town, in the form of a Meat CSA from upstate New York’s High Point Farms, which specializes in high-quality grass-fed beef and lamb, free-range eggs and pasture-raised chicken and pork. Their animals are humanely raised outside, free of antibiotics and hormones.

If you need to back up, that’s OK. So what’s a CSA anyway? Our own Michelle Weber summed it up well in her 2009 story on Downtown Harvest:

It stands for “community supported agriculture” — a joint venture in which people buy shares of a farmer’s harvest prior to the growing season. The influx of money from this yearly IPO helps the farmer purchase what she needs to run the farm — equipment, seeds, labor — while the purchasers are guaranteed a share of each week’s harvest. Farmers get the stability of a guaranteed market; shareholders the satisfaction of a bounty of local, peak-season organic produce. A CSA shares the language of the stock market, but with an intimacy that only grows between a community-supported farmer and the people she feeds.

Meat CSAs are rarer than vegetable CSAs, and while the concepts are the same, in practice they are a bit different. As High Point notes on its site, a meat CSA can be slightly more unpredictable.

“We are breaking down whole animals and attempting to divide them up randomly but fairly,” the farmers write. “Your vegetable farmer can give everyone five zucchini; we cannot give everyone two pork chops — there aren’t enough to go around.”

High Point’s meat is coming to Jersey City thanks to Celeste Governanti, the owner of Made with Love, where pickups will begin on September 21.

Governanti, who also promotes fresh and local eating through Made with Love’s “farm-to-table” communal dinners, says she came across High Point Farms while spending time in the Finger Lakes region of New York. That, combined with her personal history, made it a no-brainer to bring a CSA to her store.

“I am a butcher’s daughter; I come from a long line of Italian butchers,” she says. “It is important to me to eat organic food — the way God intended food to be — free from dangerous chemicals and inhumane practices.”

The farm is also offering artisanal cheese and fresh egg shares in addition to the meat share. Each will be distributed every other Wednesday between September and January, with a total of 10 distributions. The costs for the meat share is $595, while the cheese is $250 and the egg is $150. Or you can get into all three for a total of $945.

For more info and sample shares, click here.

Photo provided by High Point Farms