PRINTLiving in community
JOSH CHITTUM
Sandhill Farm's greenhouse.
August 12, 2009 | 12:00 p.m. CST
East Wind is expanding its nut production facilities by 25 percent, debt free.
Sandhill Farm has a successful seed growing business.
Terra Nova just installed a ground-source heat pump.
Bailouts are in the billions, our national debt is in the trillions and the unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, the highest it’s been since 1983. With industries failing and government struggling, it’s no wonder people are desperate for options. But what other ways are there?
It is suggested that the competitiveness and desire for material wealth linked to a free-market economy is part of the economic problem. If so, could a more cooperative approach — hippies moving back to the land or communes — provide the answers?
Living in community is nothing new to the United States. From the Brook Farm community of 1840s Massachusetts, to the off-the-grid movement of the 1960s and ’70s, to the organic slow food, eat local trend today, some Americans have embraced lifestyles that are simple, communal — and cheap.
Today, what used to be called communes are called intentional communities. And despite the dot-com boom (and bust) and the real-estate boom (and bust) and the stock-market boom (and bust), these new age colonies are everywhere. There are more than 1,000 such communities either formed or forming in the U.S., according to the Fellowship for Intentional Communities. Missouri is home to some of the oldest and most vibrant.
I traveled to the far south and far north of our state, with a stop smack-dab in the middle, to see three established Missouri communities: East Wind, Terra Nova and Sandhill Farm. Along the way I heard NPR somberly report the latest increases in unemployment, home foreclosures, business collapses, personal and national debt, and everyone and their brother claiming to have the secret to getting us back on track. Arnold Schwarzenegger even wants his state to debate the merits of legalizing cannabis as a source of financial stability. Groovy, huh?
My trip showed how these communities are weathering this economic storm and whether they have something to teach us.
Inside the East Wind nut butter production facilities, various products are made and distributed to ...
Claire Garden picks beans from a bean arch in the garden of Terra Nova. The ...
Terra Nova community member and income sharer Hoyt DeVane checks out the solar oven in ...
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- Dangerous DIYs
- Peaceful, easy leasing
- The Future of Fuels
- Homegrown health
- Defining this issue
- Adjusting to a sustainable life
- Q&A with Monta Welch
- Dive in
- Busting recycling myths
- Reused Fashion
- CoMo compared
- Vampire energy
- Welcome to ... Late Summer
- Trends that help and hurt
- Eco-chic in CoMo
- Columbia recycling map
- Trash alchemy
East Wind
East Wind is 220 miles south of Columbia, only a few miles from Arkansas as the crow flies. When you drive down Ozark County Road 530 to East Wind, you might notice the road is nothing but homely red clay. The branches left strewn about by the winter’s ice storm might catch your attention, and your cell phone is all but guaranteed to lose reception.
But what you’re sure to notice are the large industrial buildings nestled in the woods: facilities equipped to manufacture, pack, store and ship tons of nut butter. Enough of it each year to support a community of 62 men, women and children living on 1,045 acres.
The first factory at East Wind was built in 1981 and now houses East Wind Nut Butters, part of East Wind Community Inc., a worker-owned corporation snuggled in the secluded Ozark hills that has more than a million dollars in annual sales.
Dan Whelan wears thin glasses, a thick beard and heavily patched jeans. When he speaks, it is with authority. After nearly two years as a member at East Wind, his knowledge of the community’s operations is thorough. The factory makes a variety of natural and organic products out of peanuts, almonds, cashews and sesame seeds. This includes items such as peanut butter, tahini sauce and almond butter.
The first step to membership at East Wind requires writing a letter explaining who you are and why you want to join. After a short visitor period, applicants spend a year as provisional members. Full acceptance requires a vote of the community, and in turn confers voting rights on all issues, such as where to build a sauna.
Membership also makes you a part owner and beneficiary of East Wind’s nut butter business.
“Business is good,” Whelan says. Those words are far from the madding crowds of Detroit, Wall Street and D.C.
East Wind distributes its nut butters to natural and organic retailers nationwide as well as to manufacturers that use the butters in energy bars and chocolate products. Nationally, the nut butters are sold at stores such as Whole Foods, and locally you can pick them up at HyVee, Clovers or the Root Cellar. “Though the economy isn’t doing great, the whole foods market isn’t feeling the effects other industries are,” Whelan says.
And the market for whole foods — a blanket term for various natural, organic and unadulterated products — has only been helped by problems attached to imports in a global economy; last summer’s salmonella scare involving mass-produced peanut butter sparked consumer interest in organic and natural nut butters, Whelan says.
East Wind has been protected by more than just salmonella, though. Courtney Ives is a former member and former labor accountant. The New York native sports dark hair, a can-do attitude and refers to the outside world as Babylon. “All members like never having to pay another bill,” she says.
At East Wind, the cost of food, housing, utilities and health care is completely covered for full members. If you’re a parent, all of your children’s expenses are covered, too. It’s hard to figure cost down to the individual because everything is bought on a large scale, but total costs run about $500,000 a year. With 62 residents, that comes to an annual expenditure of a little more than $8,000 per person.
In return, every adult member is asked to work 35 hours a week. Between three and 12 hours are assigned to industrial labor — perhaps making Utopian Rope Sandals or working in “the nuthouse,” Whelan says. The other work hours are for domestic labor that services the community, such as cooking, cleaning and watching the children. Two hours are required for various kitchen duties, rounding out East Wind as a well-oiled, if not casual, company town.
East Wind even provides its members the clothes on their backs. People pick clothes from a central wardrobe, affectionately called the “commie closet,” and return them to be laundered, hung back in the closet and later picked by you or someone else. Quinn Parks, labor manager at East Wind, says some residents try to snag a favorite item again and again, essentially making it theirs; his is a well-worn Ohio State hoodie.
On top of those basics, each member is given $125 a month as unrestricted spending money. People spend their money on a variety of things, but this cash is typically used for personal enjoyment and traveling to see family.
Despite all that, East Wind has not been immune to the recession. December Wolf, kitchen manager, says it can be felt most in rising food prices, especially dairy products. Wolf has blond dreadlocks and a soft voice. The pride she takes in her work is evident; she knows where all the food comes from and how much it costs. East Wind’s gardens produce 40 percent of the community’s produce needed during the summer; a ranch on the grounds provides beef, pork and eggs. The rest is purchased from outside the community, including all their fresh produce in the winter and all grains and dairy.
Wolf buys as much as she can in bulk and always tries to pick local, organic products. She buys chicken from a local farmer who raises chicks until they are ready to be butchered.
East Wind members eat most meals together in the common kitchen located in “Rock Bottom,” named for the bedrock foundation of the building. The rustic wooden structure serves as the community hangout and is decorated with an eclectic mix of pictures and signs, including one announcing: “Hippies Use Side Door.” You enter through a small living room with art on the walls and hand drums by the couch. Next, pass through a large dining room, where you can find people chatting and setting tables for the next meal. Finally, you reach the kitchen. The space seems too small to feed all the people it does, but the scuffed stainless steel stove tells the story of many delicious meals. East Winders typically eat every dinner, about four lunches a week and Sunday brunch together.
There are a few satellite kitchens where smaller meals are prepared and eaten; most of this food is purchased individually by members for their own personal use. One of these kitchens is in Lilliput, a part of the community dedicated to raising children.
As remote as their community is, East Winders don’t lack for entertainment. They watch movies, surf the Web on the community’s desktops and subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Their community library was the largest in Ozark County until a recent grant expanded the public library in Gainesville, 10 miles away. A wide array of musical instruments are available as well as an active recording studio.
East Wind recently celebrated its 35th birthday and, for the first time in Parks’ six years here, has a waiting list of potential members. Wolf, former membership manager, says what seems to have changed in the recession is not the number of applicants but the number of people who apply and actually follow through.
“They can’t find a job and are looking for something different,” Whelan says.
Parks nods: “That’s when they find East Wind.”
Terra Nova
Terra Nova is snuggled in the middle of Gary Street, just off West Broadway about a mile from the public library in Columbia. The gleam of the metal roofs gives the two side-by-side homes an almost angelic glow. Neighbors don’t seem to mind having an intentional community on the block, and the members of Terra Nova sure like their neighbors. Terra Nova founder Claire Garden is especially fond of Oliver, a neighbor’s Siamese cat who’s great at catching the voles in the community’s garden.
Terra Nova was founded in 1995 on the sustainable principles of four former East Winders, including Garden. Three of those members are still there today, and the community’s fourth member is also from East Wind. They share two houses and lots of work; they garden, they cook, they clean.
Garden, a retired teacher, has been living as sustainably as she can since the 1980s. She lived in rural Kansas for nearly 10 years and tried to start a community there in 1984. When that didn’t work out, she eventually found her way to East Wind in 1994. There, she met and married her husband Evan Prost. Garden, who has published several young adult novels, all of them about or inspired by egalitarian community, says living in community is like being part of a self-supporting family. Garden says in June 1995 there were several members of East Wind interested in forming a new community, and by November they had decided on Columbia, so they made the trip north and formed Terra Nova.
They don’t like to crunch numbers at Terra Nova, but Hoyt Devane, the garden and finance manager, says they are able to feed the four members of the community for about $600 a month, or $150 each. Much of that comes from the lush garden, which contains more than 30 varieties of fruits and vegetables, such as quince and Chinese cabbage.
Food they don’t grow themselves is usually purchased in bulk from the Blue Planet buying club, a purchasing co-op for many fair-trade, organic and natural products. They buy their meat and dairy from grocers they can walk to such as the Root Cellar and the local farmers’ market.
Entertainment costs are also minimal. There is a television but no cable. The TV stays in a closet and is pulled out only when someone wants to watch a movie. The bigger activity is reading; it’s hard to find a wall in either house without a bookshelf.
Terra Nova members installed a 2-kilowatt system of grid-tie solar panels this past fall and are part of a grid-tie system. That means they use power from the electric company if their panels aren’t keeping up with their consumption and sell power back to the grid if they are consuming less than they produce. Devane says it’s not uncommon for them to generate more electricity than they consume.
The three remaining founders of Terra Nova are income sharing, but the community doesn’t operate its own business. Instead, each full member contributes his or her individual income. Prost works for the physical therapy department at MU. Garden is retired, so her social security goes into the community pot. Hoyt’s contribution comes largely through doing labor and management jobs for the community. The fourth member also works for MU to support himself and pay for his share of the expenses.
When the community was envisioned, the four founders were interested in adding members. But as time passed, things changed, including one member leaving. They say they couldn’t find people they were confident would stay long term, so they were unwilling to invest in additional housing and are now content with just the three of them as full members and taking on an occasional expense-sharing member. Expense-sharing members are more like roommates; they don’t share all their income with the group, but help pay for food and maintenance in return for lodging.
The lifestyle at Terra Nova is so simple, and costs are so minimal, that Garden says the larger economy has had little impact on them, so far.
“If the nation goes into deep depression or the monetary system collapses, we will be affected by the turmoil along with everyone else,” says Garden. “Our long habits of frugality will be useful as will our skills in raising and preserving food. But we are as dependent as others on police and fire fighters, and we do not produce even half of the food we consume.”
Members make a conscious effort not to buy what they don’t need or waste what they have. Garden says the members buy most of their clothes used: “We wear them out before turning them into rags.” They own the two houses outright, and their only debt is a credit card they pay in full every month. “No interest,” Garden says.
Sandhill Farm
Two and a half hours north of Columbia, in the rolling hills of rural Scotland County, you coast down highway M into the tiny town of Rutledge. Rutledge is home to 103 people, the world’s largest and oldest gun and dog auction and hillbilly flea market and three intentional communities. Sandhill Farm, founded in 1974, is a thriving mini-economy that does everything from selling mustard to operating online bookstores to support its members, who are currently six adults and one teenager.
Like Terra Nova and East Wind, Sandhill is an income- sharing community with most of its income generated through work done by members of the community. They have a joint checking account with every member’s signature on it. Members say they generally trust each other to spend as they see fit, but if a purchase is more than $100, the group likes to talk about it. The labor system is just as informal and trusting. Kathe Nicosia, a seven-year resident, says while some members often figure out the day’s chores over their morning coffee, others form work groups that have regular meetings to plan work for the next week or so.
In return for working at Sandhill, members have all their expenses covered, including food, health care and travel. The estimated cost: $10,000 per year per person.
About half of the community’s income comes through the sale of its food products: honey, mustard, horseradish, garlic, relishes, salsas, chutneys and sorghum. The products can be purchased directly from Sandhill through its Web site (sandhillfarm.org) or at retailers in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan. The other half of the income is generated through online work. Members host one of the business offices for The Fellowship of Intentional Community at Sandhill. Sandhill is also affiliated with the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, an organization for income-sharing communities. A health care fund is sponsored by FEC and covers members for chronic illnesses and catastrophic accidents and illness. Sandhill pays a premium for each member every quarter.
The mainstay of Sandhill’s food products is sorghum. The community grows about six acres of sorghum a year, then harvests it by hand. The juices from the stalks of the 10-foot plants are cooked down to produce a thick, sweet and brown liquid similar to molasses or honey.
The sorghum harvest has turned into an annual celebration; Sandhill hosts an open house for the public during this time, and visitors camp out on the grounds and help out with the harvest. Sandhill members also celebrate other occasions, such as May Day, with members of Dancing Rabbit, a nearby ecovillage that focuses on sustainable living, and Red Earth Farms, Dancing Rabbit’s adjoining land trust of homesteads.
People interested in joining Sandhill are asked to write a letter describing themselves, their experience or interest in community and a rural lifestyle and their specific interest in Sandhill. They are invited to stay for about a week to meet the members and sometimes are encouraged to visit other communities to compare. Sandhill will then ask applicants they are interested in to come back for an extended stay. After that, if both sides want to go forward, the applicant will be invited to stay at Sandhill as a provisional member for six months with full membership rights, both economic and decision making. After six months, the relationship is reviewed to determine if everyone wants to continue.
Sandhill Farm is certified organic, and Stan Hildebrand, a member since 1980, is an organic farm inspector. Hildebrand has spent much of his life devoted to the kind of simplicity found at Sandhill; his beard is gray now, and the only thing bluer than his eyes are his overalls. He was in Guatemala from 1976 to 1979 trying to start a community. “There I read a story in Communities Magazine about Sandhill,” Hildebrand says. He decided it looked like the place for him.
The 135-acre farm has between 25 and 30 tillable acres. However, due to the strict rotation schedule Sandhill must follow to be organically certified, not every field is planted with a crop every year. Chickens and turkeys are raised on the grounds; members say their chicken coop was the first straw bale structure in Scotland County. The majority of their meat comes from the white-tailed deer population. They buy hunting tags each deer season and stock up on the wild game. In the past, they have raised other livestock on the farm as well.
Many of the buildings at Sandhill were built using either recycled wood from previous structures or trees the members cut themselves. Members participate in various forestry preservation projects and keep most of their land thickly forested. They use composting toilets and collect rainwater for irrigation. Composting toilets collect the waste and let it naturally break down. Once it’s properly composted, they spread it in the woods. But Hildebrand says they don’t really think of themselves as “eco” — this was their way of life before being environmentally friendly was a fad.
Nicosia and Hildebrand both say their business and lives haven’t been affected by the economic downturn.
“Country boys and girls will always survive,” Nicosia says.
“Basically what we sell is food, and people still eat,” Hildebrand adds.
In the 30-plus years Hildebrand has lived in community, he says he’s noticed that visitors and interest in membership tend to rise in bad economies. He is seeing the same thing happen again.
And therein lies the bigger lesson, he says. Sandhill members are protected from the recession because they always live within their means, regardless of what’s going on in the rest of the economy. The problem is that most people refuse to do without things they can’t afford and don’t really need.
“Basically, it was a giant credit bubble that burst,” he says. “If you overstretched your credit, you’re probably in trouble now.”
Hildebrand also thinks that if people shared more of their resources, which is common in communities, a lot of costs could be avoided. Besides food, lodging, work and income, the members of Sandhill share two Honda Civics and a Ford Ranger. But America encourages a sense of individualism that makes people want to own their own things, he says, and that unwillingness to share is costing everyone now.
Heading Home
Driving back I realized the communities’ movement seems to be stronger than ever due to the slipping economy. People are seeing the problems around them and are looking for other options. Whether it’s profit sharing like East Wind, buying used clothes like Terra Nova, or growing nearly all your food like Sandhill Farm, these communities have found another way. By living a little more simply and sharing more than the average person, they have created a welcome buffer from the economic downturn.
the article on the intentional communites was excellent! as a former member of east wind, and a visitor to terra nova, sandhill, dancing rabbit- i applaud your journalism. well done.
Posted by erin herwig on Sep 20, 2009 at 10:17 a.m. (Report Comment)