The Farm and The Farm

[images borrowed from Vanity Fair online]

Suffering from insomnia lately has me up reading all sorts of things. I googled 'The Farm' to get the address of the restaurant my friends and I are going to for my birthday and up popped this crazy hippie commune- well naturally I had to check it out. As I clicked through the pretty disorganized website I started to loose hope, but then I found a link to this Vanity Fair article written about the farm or The Farm. Now this is where I started getting really interested.

This 'coincidence' all ties into to my recent and amazing visit to a few pretty impressive Hudson Valley Farms this weekend (Ronny's, Billiam's, Pete and Rory's, and Severine's). I also wicked visited an anarchist commune in Germantown. I watched and even helped a little as a dear was butchered in a true homstead style. It was such an amazing weekend, and most of all it enlightened this City kid to the fact that all this back-to-the-land reading and chating has a purpose. There is a possibility of people doing this 'stuff.' Screw that, it (a.k.a homesteading) is actually happening, people are moving back to the land, they are turning it to it not only for food and function but for guidance and a new (or shall I say old) way of life.

Check out these communal workers and horse-plow farming techniques.




Is this not the most amazing picture of a family farming together?




I love this clip from the article, because well it sums up EXACTLY how I feel:

Jim, who became an activist while majoring in engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, picks up the conversational thread: "Personally, I needed a break from American pop culture. It's The Grand Distraction—capital T, capital G, capital D. I'm tired of being part of some millionaire's game."

Even more true is the last paragraph of the article:

Albert Bates, now a tribal elder, has to laugh when he hears the hot talk of the rising Farmies. "Those kids are bringing in a lot of energy," he says. "As hippies of the 60s and 70s, we endowed our kids with this meta-program of peace, love, and ecology, and now they're holding our feet to the fire and saying, 'O.K., let's see it.' It's like we sent a reminder to ourselves down through time."