[This is a guest post by Albert, whose amazing erudition and experience gives him the right to tell just about anyone to sit down, shut up and listen—although he is far too nice to actually say that. But I am not, so I will: sit down, shut up and listen.]
During the early days of The Farm,
1971-1973, we learned a number of lessons that will be useful again
now that a rapid petrocollapse scenario is likely to come to pass.
The Farm spiritual community emerged from a 50-bus caravan of 320
Haight-Ashbury refugees fleeing hard drugs, exploitation and
counterculture tourism. After a year on the road the gypsy vagabonds
pooled inheritances and purchased 1050 acres (450 hectares) of land
80 miles (130 km) from Nashville. It was US$70 per acre.
The Farm grew to a standing population
of well over 1000, with 20 satellite centers, then, in the early
1980s, declined and decollectivized, bringing its population to under
200. Since then it has experienced something of a renaissance,
finding new popularity amongst permaculturists, ecovillagers, and
roving students. But let’s begin at the beginning, when our group
landed in Tennessee.
Living in remodeled school buses was
quite an adequate introduction to “roughing it,” especially for
those of us who had never gone camping as children. The “honey pot”
latrine bucket, mosquito-proof backpacker tents, canteens,
flashlights, storm lanterns, and two-burner Coleman stoves were
familiar to the pioneer settlers by the time they first stepped off
the bus.
The land itself was barren of amenities
save a small log cabin, a horse barn and a line shack, and so the
first order of business was setting up facilities for bathing,
sanitation, kitchen and sleeping. I’ll skip over the organizational
aspects here because they would require a lengthier and more nuanced
discussion; suffice it to say that circumnavigating North America in
a 50-bus caravan required a degree of organization similar to running
a rock-and-roll band tour. That’s enough organization to get you
started in designing and constructing a settlement, although perhaps
not enough to keep it intact for very long.
For pumped water, an engine was lifted
from a Volkswagen Bug and set on blocks in a springhouse. A well-used
and rusting 5700 liter (1500 gallon) water tower was purchased for
scrap value, repaired and erected atop a hill above the springhouse.
This required minor welding and auto mechanics, as well as a
continuous supply of petrol. Some years later, when power lines came
in, the VW engine and springhouse were replaced with a submersible
pump and well. Today it would have been built with photovoltaics or
wind power, but such technology, while already available in the
1970s, was well beyond the reach of a community that subsisted on
average per capita cash income of US$1 per day for its first 13
years.
After the first winter, a second,
larger water tower was erected near a 100 meter (300 foot) well with
good aquifer recharge. The tower was salvaged from a railroad company
for a purchase price of US$1, but moving and erecting the tower and
tank required a crane. From the towers, water was delivered to homes
in 20 liter (5 gallon) jugs by horse wagon.
While the buses provided initial
shelter, with more than 6 residents per bus on average, after 8 to 12
months of living on the road most people wanted to get out into
better housing, as quickly as possible. At the time, the government
of the State of Tennessee held monthly auctions of surplus property,
and Korean War vintage army tents could be bought for as little as
US$15. These formed the basis of our first foray into home
construction. With salvaged materials from construction sites and
dumpsters, they morphed into “touses and hents.” Going into a
partnership with a nearby sawmill allowed us to add some beautiful
timber-frame buildings and D-frames. Common buildings such as the
community kitchen, motor pool, canning & freezing, print shop,
clinic and school sprang almost entirely from salvaged materials.
Scraping mortar off cement blocks and straightening nails become
well-practiced skills.
There was limited electricity to the
site, and for an entire decade almost all of our electricity came
from 12-volt DC systems powered by car batteries. Initially the
batteries were charged by switching them through vehicles every day,
but full discharge cycles make for short battery life, so after
trying novel methods of pedal power, bamboo wind generators and other
wacky ideas, most houses went to a “trickle charge” system — a
long copper cable run through the trees to a central power center
that took its electrons from Tennessee Valley Authority (although we
always sent them back in the next nanosecond).
At one of these power centers, where we
did our canning and freezing, we erected walk-in coolers and
freezers. Refrigeration was a necessity that is as difficult to avoid
as it is to achieve. A few of the buses came with propane-powered
fridges and they were a blessing. Most of the households relied on a
system of 5-gallon (20 liter) buckets that rotated to the walk-in
coolers and freezers near the cannery. Buckets with tight lids were
obtained from dumpsters behind the McDonalds in town. The other
essential item was a Flexible Flyer wooden wagon with slatted sides.
If you couldn’t get your parents to give one of those to their
grandchildren for Christmas, the next best thing was to weld a bike
trailer or pushcart to get your buckets to the neighborhood cooler.
Buckets were also employed to carry
diapers and laundry to a communal laundromat, which was set up near
another trickle-charge node. Salvaged coin-op equipment was purchased
in bulk, the coin slots replaced with toggle switches, and a large
diaper rinse and centrifuge babe-manure extractor installed. The
grey- and black-water flowed to a constructed wetlands and rainbird,
creating what today, 40 years later, are some of the richest soils on
the property.
Communal unisex showering facilities
were constructed in places with good supplies of water and a way to
heat it: downhill from the original water tower; beside Canning &
Freezing and the Farm Store; at the Farm School and print shop.
A flour mill took over the tack room in
the horse barn. Initially we used a small stone mill to grind corn
meal. Later we bought a larger, 3-break steel feed mill and set it up
in the line shack, connected to 3-phase AC power. Arrayed around the
roller mill were Clipper seed cleaners, sifters, a coffee roaster, an
oat huller, and bagging racks. Within a year the mill was churning
out a ton per day of wheat, corn, soy and buckwheat flours, pastry
flours, corn meal, grits, groats, mixed cereals and porridges, horse feed, soy nuts, popcorn, coffee, and peanut butter.
Transportation and communications were
priorities, because our sustainability depended on commerce, and
without good transportation and communications any attempts to create
a business would have been hampered. Bear in mind that for the first
13 years the experiment was communal, meaning shared purse. Just as
many societies throughout history, we have found that in times of
difficulty a reversion to communal economics provides greater
survival advantages than the exercise of individuated private
property rights. After achieving stability, most drop the communal
form in order to stimulate greater enterprise. This was the path
taken by Amana, Oneida, many kibbutzim, The Farm, the People's
Republic of China, and, now, Cuba.
Any group that can cross the country in
30-year-old school buses will learn something about automotive
mechanics. Our motor pool and junkyard became one of the technology
hubs for The Farm, a place where anything from a hay rake to a fire
truck could be machined and rebuilt, nearly from scratch.
The first two teams of horses, black
Belgians and white Percherons, were acquired from neighboring Old
Order Amish. They laughed at our feeble attempts, as vegans, to
replace leather harness with more hippy-kosher canvas and Naugahide.
“How’d you raise that nauga?” they’d ask. Interesting koan!
Communication was accomplished through
a rapid succession of home and business devices. The log cabin became
the business center with two phone lines. On US$1 per person per
day, personal long distance charges were unaffordable, but one of our
caravaners was an Eagle Scout with a ham radio merit badge, and he
made a radio shack in the horse barn and began training ham radio
operators to staff an amateur band Farm Net. Before the Internet I
was WB4LXJ.
A 12-volt telephone system was
installed to link every bus, tent, home and business. The dial tone
was replaced with a Grateful Dead or reggae melody or a public
service announcement (1000 jars of catsup planned today, canners
needed; line at the laundry is now 90 minutes; bean shucking and
banjo at horse barn 7 pm). The dial itself was replaced with a
pushbutton that you used for Morse code to signal where you were
calling. Four shorts meant “all points.” It was a party line, but
there was a second carrier band, the “Hot Line,” used for
emergencies. A toggle switch flipped you over to that band where an
operator was always on call, sitting at a phone console to summon
fire, police and ambulance and to assume management of the emergency.
This pre-dated most emergency telephone services.
Emergencies were taken seriously, and
fire marshals, gate and patrol security, and emergency medical
responders were treated as actual jobs from the very beginning. Each
became more sophisticated as the body of experience grew. Naive
hippies learned to adjust to the rigors of self-reliance, which could
sometimes be terrifying, such as when a kerosene lamp tips over in a
canvas tent, the Ku-Klux-Klan rides up to the front gate or a deputy
sheriff wanders into the marijuana patch while hunting deer.
Finding additional uses for the copper
wires we passed through the treetops, we sent a TV signal through
the phone lines, and could download direct network feeds from a
12-foot (3.7 meter) dish made of pine 2x4s and chicken wire. We watched the
Watergate hearings that way. We produced our own shows, too, sent
from the Bandland Studio tent to 12-volt TVs in tents and buses. If
you were within 30 feet of the phone line, you could pick up the
signal on channel 3. We watched Greenpeace work out its chess moves
with the Spanish Navy in real time, using a slo-scan ham TV
transmitter installed on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior, sort
of a proto-Animal-Planet pilot.
Eventually, when CB radios became
popular, we were able to install them in our vehicles and interface
them with the ham radio and “Beatnik Bell” phone system. Free
international calls became possible. Our “Extra Class” hams grew
in proficiency and could link to satellites, monitor police, military
and secret service sidebands, and bounce audio, digital and TV
signals around the world to an expanding Farm Net.
A weekly newspaper, Amazing Tales of
Real Life, began coming out of the print shop, along with a host
of do-it-yourself books that turned into a brand. A brisk traffic in
daily visitors, more than a hundred some days, required tour crews
and a large hostel tent, but also supplied nearly free labor for the
fields.
From the very first arrival of the
buses and through the first 5 years a community dining facility was
an essential efficiency, and one of the main reasons that living
could be so cheap. Milk was made from soybeans, which became tofu,
mayonnaise, yogurt, sour cream and ice cream. Soybeans were also made
into coffee, tempeh, soysage (from okara), soyburgers and
stroganoffs. A bushel of dry soybeans (35 liters) cost US$3 (US$7
today). The protein needs (with all 8 essential amino acids in good
proportion) for a hard-laboring farm worker can be supplied on less
than a pound (450 grams) per day, rehydrated and made into gourmet
vegan cuisine. Thinking of storing food for emergencies? Include
soybeans.
Tracing back down memory lane to my
experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with
just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place
to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge
and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in
a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it
into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned,
dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and
cornbread with pickled japapeños; guitars and song around a fire
under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world;
community.
