Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative

This is my 2^nd Unilocal review ever… and i apologize for the length. I don’t really write review unless i am motivated strongly either positively OR in this case because of negative experience.
The Summary:
Very disappointed with this CSA. I was very excited to be supporting farms as well as eating food that more fresh however Lancaster Farms is no longer one I will be supporting. I am writing this review after 7 weeks into a 13 week share but it seems like my first impressions were spot on in that i immediately regretting signing up for a 13 week share!!!
There are other competitors out there that are awesome, I used Hometown Harvest and they are fantastic! Great food selection and quality. You can fully customize your order each week or… NOT order at all! Also, they deliver to your door!
The breakdown:
Meat share — this continues to astound me about the poor selection, quantity and even quality of each weekly share. In this area, there also seems to be a lack of transparency with not having the weight of every item printed alongside it. Please note, I do acknowledge fully there are several meat items where the weight is provided and that is extremely helpful. However, this leads me to my further confusion as how could that meat cost $ 35 dollars per week! Each week was a disappointment
Veggie Share — Having participated in getting fresh food shipped to my house (like this CSA) before, I am familiar with the wide selection and array of vegetables that one must be prepared to test your culinary skills. And I’ve tried to use this as an opportunity to not only expand the pallet BUT try it as a culinary challenge.
However, routinely, there are veggies provided that have left me stumped, baffled and even confused as to which item was which! Although, that’s not even the biggest offense in my opinion but rather the lack of freshness & overall quality on average of each share. Please note, there have been one or two items of divine quality (red carrots or something like that were amazing) but on the whole this also compounds the feeling of disappointment each week.
Yogurt — nothing to say here… other than one week it didn’t show up and the customer service rep. help refunded the missing item.
Pick up location — This was completely disastrous at the beginning but over 7 weeks it settled out and got somewhat better.

I love the CSA concept but your experience with Lancaster Farm Fresh seems to depend heavily on your pickup site and how organized the hosts are. I did one season with Lancaster and won’t be renewing.
The winter CSA was just OK. Tons of root vegetables and orange carrots every single week. The site had a 45 minute pickup window on Wednesday mornings, well after I’d already left and arrived for work. Pickups later in the day «aren’t’ guaranteed» and more than once I didn’t receive the items I paid for. More concerning was that no one from LFFC seemed to care. Every week there were emails to the site’s listserv from someone who didn’t get what they paid for.
I refuse to pre-​pay for something with no guarantee that I’ll get what I paid for. There are lots of other CSAs in the area and I’ll probably give at least one of them a try.

This was my first year doing the CSA (community supported agriculture) thing. I loved it. It was a great selection and a ton of veggies (I got the half share). Everything was really clean. I found myself looking forward to each week so I can try new veggies and come up with different recipes. The season is crazy long (like end of May until sometime in December) and worth every penny I paid. They have pickup locations in Arlington and in DC.