Along with people's desire to support local growers came their desire to have more of a connection with the farmers and their farms. This was reflected by C8: “I feel like I could certainly be interested by something that would establish a little bit stronger relationship between me and some farm.” This need for connection was also sometimes framed in terms of the lack of connection many people currently had with their food. C5 said "I think that the last 50, 60 years has brought kind of a disassociation, people don't know where there food comes from." C2 said that "you have to get your food from somewhere, and if we become more distant from our farmers, there might be a problem with diversity of our lives in society"

The tag clouds above show the words consumers thought of when given the words "farm" and "farmer."  Interestingly, you can see that nearly all of our consumers mentioned "overalls" in connection with farmers.  This shows the parochial vision of farming many non-farmers have.  Since the majority of consumers have so little connection with farmers, they have no vision of "modern farming," or what a farmer today might look like or wear.  They are forced to fall back on the picture of a farmer wearing overalls with a pitchfork and a straw hat.

Some consumers did have more of a connection to farmers, and CSA members in particular mentioned how much they enjoyed their feeling of intimacy with the farmers, like C1: "it feels good, to get to know the farmers" and C4, who said about CSA farmers: “they're part of the family in a way.” C6 talked about being a member of a CSA where the farm would put pictures of their child and their chickens in the CSA box. She said she loved this connection and that she “saved every single tiny chicken picture.”

With or without the CSA connection, consumers mentioned wanting to know more about farms and farmers and the story behind their food. C11 said “I want to know more about the farm where it came from, who was in charge, who grew it.” C5 said that he would consider joining a CSA "if I knew something about the history of how they came to do what they did."