Brandenburg, Germany
In the expanding regional food movement surrounding Berlin and Brandenburg, community-supported agriculture (CSA) forms a vital bond between producers and consumers. Yet, as these solidarity-based networks grow, many CSA and direct-marketing farms increasingly face organizational and staffing constraints. They often struggle with the recurring administrative workload involved in running these models. Tasks like processing member payments, managing member databases, and coordinating public relations require considerable hours, taking critical time away from field cultivation, ecological care, and direct community engagement. To lift this structural burden, Land Kultur Erleben e.V. was restructured in early 2025 to provide an organizational home for this new initiative. Building on ideas developed in connection with the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNE), the association now hosts the Eberswalde Living Lab and provides the organizational and professional framework for the development of Trifolia. Operating as an agile foundational team, the association works closely with its local pilot partner, CSA OderSchwalbe, to analyze practical economic data and field realities. Their overarching goal is to consolidate recurring administrative workflows into a shared, centralized service framework. This model allows participating farms to maintain absolute operational autonomy while significantly reducing their individual weekly workloads. By shifting the administrative backend to a collaborative structure managed by experts, the Living Lab strengthens regional food system resilience and ensures that local producers can focus on what they do best: nurturing the soil and feeding their communities.
Trifolia is creating a modular shared-service framework to reduce administrative burdens for CSA and direct-marketing farms, strengthen cooperation, and support long-term economic resilience.
