The Farm

After the Halloween party Saturday night, I saw an interesting Tennesseean article on The Farm.

For those of you who don't know, The Farm is a modern day experiment in communal living going on right outside Summertown, TN. The Farm was started in 1971 by one Stephen Gaskin and its prominence has waxed and waned over the years. As a kid I remember two things about The Farm:

1. National Geographic once did a feature on The Farm's midwives.
2. Charles Manson supposedly wanted to go live there if he ever got out of jail.

Those two memories provide very different perspectives on The Farm, but that's kind of how most people felt about the hippie commune out in the middle of nowhere. Where did they come from? Well, in the words of The Farm's official history:

In 1966, a young assistant professor at San Francisco State College began scheduling classes to talk about what was happening outside his window. The classes grew too large for the college halls, so the class moved to a church, a theater, and then, in 1969, to the Family Dog, Chet Helms' rock hall on the coast. Monday Night Class became a weekly pilgrimage of throngs of hippies from up and down the coast ... At the center of this psychedelic crucible, the professor in the welder's hood, was 31-year-old Stephen Gaskin, known simply to most hippies as "Stephen."

This psychedelic crucible eventually landed in Summertown because, "The Farm soon found that Tennessee laws were hospitable to unconventional religions. All that was required to become a church was a preacher and a congregation and the Farm had both."

As a child I recall that residents of The Farm were, understandably, viewed with some suspicion. The "smelly hippies" were just strange. Still, the general attitude seemed to be one of live and let live. We didn't bother them and they didn't bother us. Over the years I'd heard that The Farm was in trouble, so I was sort of pleasantly surprised to see that it's still around. What really caught my attention in the article, though, were the changes The Farm has had to go through over the years.

But communal living caused problems. People were inclined to do the kind of work they wanted, even if experimenting with alternative energy sources "wasn't putting bread and butter on the table,'' [Farm resident] Holzapfel said.

In the early days, you could do maintenance on farm equipment one week and grow mushrooms the next. That led to inefficiencies and jobs being done by people who weren't necessarily good at them, Holzapfel said.

I try and try again to explain the benefits of specialization and division of labor to my econ classes, but I don't know that I've ever seen a better explanation. Here is a group of people who tried to live outside the "capitalist system" and they now recognize the difficulties in an unorganized society. No, I'm not arguing that the "free market" is the only way to organize production, but it is a darned efficient way to figure out who should be working on farm equipment and who should be growing mushrooms.

Further, Farm residents now realize there really is no such thing as a free lunch: "A school founded in the commune's early days now charges tuition." Plus, they've even outsourced a lot of the actual production for the communal businesses that remain.

Farm resident Frank Michael believes the evolution of The Farm was inevitable. Why? Because they got older.

Michael believes the progression was natural -- as people got older, they wanted homes and spouses and children. They didn't want to stay up until 3 a.m. discussing how to change the world.

"We didn't account for the fact we were going to get older,'' Michael said.

So, is it impossible to have higher ideals that exist outside the dominant paradigm? No, but I think it's also foolish to blindly adhere to those ideals as the reality around you changes. What's the end result?

We got a lot more practical, but we're still idealists,'' he [Michael] said.

So, I was glad to see The Farm is still alive and kicking. I was also glad to see that they've realized even communal societies need some method of organization and rationing. I just wish people would remember this when they talk about "pie in the sky" solutions to education and health care (for example) problems today.

Regardless, The Farm is a significant piece of U.S. social history from the last quarter of the 20th century AND it's still around AND it's nearby (for many of you). So, if you get a wild hair sometime, go pay them a visit. I've never been, but I'm going to try to go before it's too late. I figure I might learn something -- or at least it'll be an opportunity to make fun of the smelly hippies (a la Eric Cartman).