Community

In earlier times, farms were often operated and cared for by an extended family with several children, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. That is not often the case today, when families are smaller and machines have replaced people. Yet, a producing farm, particularly a non-mechanized, diversified farm, requires many people working in concert to operate it successfully, posing the social and economic question of how diverse people, unrelated by family ties, can come together and achieve the clarity of purpose and spiritual unity necessary to carry out the work of the farm responsibly and joyfully. In order to do the physical work of the farm, we must be united in spirit.

We have discovered over the past 25 years of working with people who are often new to farming and farming work that questions about our social and economic organization and working in community will often arise. We may not always have the answers to those questions, but we do have the goal of working and studying together to learn how to address them.

We approach this effort by sharing and looking at our individual biographies as they relate to our personal development and interpersonal relationships, by learning about human social order and its evolution through writings on the Threefold Social Order by Rudolf Steiner and others, and by exploring from various viewpoints the nature, meaning, and compensation of work in our lives.

We believe that each individual involved in the farm must be willing to step out of conventional interpretations of social and economic relationships and engage in the work of developing a new and more conscious understanding and vision of those areas, individually and as a community.