New Story Farm

Mission: To support a true agrarian community and to help beginning farmers get their start. We have lived at Earthaven Ecovillage and the Possibility Alliance as well as, visited many communities in America and Australia. We struggle living outside of community however, we have not found a community that emphasizes sustainable farming so we endeavor to help create one.

From www.ic.org/directory/new-story-farm/:

A "story" is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods."To enact" is to live so as to make a story a reality. "Culture" is a people enacting a story. If you believe that the world belongs to man, you will see all other life as a resource. If you believe that man belongs to the world, you see all other life as partners. On our farm, we are surrounded by annual agriculture and although we grew up eating from this system and have gratitude for that, we also see that annual agriculture is intrinsically unsustainable. Even at it's best, it is extractive and erosive, leading in time to desertification. We want to enact a new story that puts humans back in partnership with all other creation.

You want to be peasants?!

After reading this piece in The Hand Sculpted House, you may just want to be one too.

"Peasants satisfy their own basic needs: they grow their food, build the houses they live in, often make their own clothes. Most peasants collect medicinal herbs, treat medical emergencies, supply their family entertainment. They experience fully what they do every day; they have time-they feel joy. Their culture is integral, it makes sense. Farmers by contrast grow things to sell. With what they earn from their products, they buy their groceries, building materials, clothes, entertainment and medical insurance. They must also drive to market, pay taxes, perhaps send their kids to agricultural college. Increasingly they must buy machinery, seeds, farm chemicals. Farmers have no time to directly enjoy satisfying their own needs, so they purchase their satisfactions; they buy ready-made clothing and "convenience" foods."
We feel that food is so grossly undervalued in the american culture that it is often insulting to the grower to sell it. Our aim is fair energy exchange and many times that is not with currency. Our main goal is to sustain ourselves and our immediate community while facilitating a habitat that promotes diversity in the natural community around us. Our surplus will be "banked" in the soil and the life in and above it.

A service of the Data Commons Co-op. The project has been supported by Equal Exchange, the Cooperative Charitable Trust, the USDA, and many others - thank you! Tech volunteers over the years include: Benjamin Bradley with support from GAIA Host. Ben Mauer with support from Quilted. Paul Fitzpatrick. Ronin Tech Collective, Brattleboro Tech Collective, Sligo Computer Services. Jason Lemieux. Default map tiles courtesy of MapQuest. Default map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA.