The Farm (Tennessee)
[1] The Farm was established after Stephen Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans, and trucks from San Francisco on a four-month speaking tour across the US.
From its founding in the 1970s, Farm members took vows of poverty and owned no personal possessions other than clothing and tools, though this restriction loosened as time passed.
[5] The Farm formed a non-profit corporation called The Foundation to provide a common financial structure for the community and members contributed their incomes to it.
"[8] Gaskin, who had served in the United States Marine Corps, got his start as a religious leader in San Francisco in the 1960s, coming to teach a blend of Eastern religions and Christianity.
[9] The Farm's outreach, combined with notoriety through popular media articles, led to a population boom that eventually peaked at around 1600 members living on the main property.
Signs started to appear between 1975 and 1979 that the Tennessee community's weak infrastructure and low income was insufficiently developed to support such a continuously large influx of new members, most of whom did not contribute substantially.
Some donated inherited wealth or investment income, but most of it went for the group's Third World projects, or for immediate needs such as food and clothing, rather than planned improvements to the property.
[7] Furthering the Farm's growing pains was a baby boom resulting from the large number of young adults of childbearing age combined with an enthusiastic family philosophy being put into practice.
Ina May Gaskin and other resident midwives advertised their services in the national underground press, which led to numerous couples and their infants moving in without contributing.
A small number of infants were adopted by Farm members after the midwives offered to accept, deliver, and keep a woman's baby as an alternative to abortion.
Gaskin insisted that anyone who wished to partake of Farm life should be allowed to try, even those who were seriously mentally ill, believing the experience would be therapeutic.
As the Farm's population peaked, a disproportionately higher number of children or less-skilled residents could not significantly contribute to the community's economic needs.
[citation needed] In the 1990s, with the community back on solid ground, The Farm returned to its original purpose of initiating social change through outreach and example.
The Ecovillage Training Center was established as an educational facility in new technologies such as solar energy, bio fuels, and construction techniques based on locally available, eco-friendly materials.
[13] The Farm maintains contact with some of its 4000-plus former members through email lists, social media forums, an annual reunion each summer, and through the work of its nonprofit organizations.
[citation needed] Stephen Gaskin believed that marriage was a sacred act and that, "For a community to exist in harmony and balance, both kinds of energy had to be nurtured, and most importantly shared.
They also run a "soy dairy", which developed and later marketed a soymilk ice "cream" called "Ice-Bean", and a vegetable store in the town of Summertown.
In addition to the rock music recordings, Stephen Gaskin released a spoken word album titled the Great Western Tour in 1974, which was produced and distributed in the same way as their other LPs.
Plenty's most notable early project was its four-year presence in the Guatemalan highlands after the earthquake of 1976, helping to rebuild 1,200 houses and lay 27 kilometers (17 miles) of waterpipe.
Plenty has set up medical clinics in Lesotho and Mexico and created the Jefferson Award-winning South Bronx Ambulance Project in New York City.
Plenty was one of the first relief organizations to enter New Orleans, getting past federal roadblocks to bring supplies to survivors just three days after Hurricane Katrina.
Plenty helped establish a base camp for volunteers and channeled funding to Common Ground Collective, a local group assisting in cleanup, legal defense services, and the operation of free clinics.
Melvyn Stiriss, a Plenty volunteer carpenter describes a year of earthquake reconstruction, working with Mayans, in Hippie Peace Corps Goes to Guatemala, part 4 of Voluntary Peasants published by New Beat Books, Warwick, NY 2015 Some of the early titles produced by the Book Publishing Company illustrated the early interests of the Farm community; volumes included The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook (ed.
Originally relying on antique kerosene lanterns and manual message runners, The Farm grew rapidly to adopt appropriate technology for electricity, communications, medical, mass media, education, and entertainment.
Spurred mainly by the need for prompt childbirth assistance and emergency medical response, a field-phone style party line system was installed by The Farm's telephone crew in 1971.
Some individuals initially resisted running electricity and power lines beyond the administration office and publishing center, with the hope of establishing off-grid decentralized utilities instead.
Ham radio was invaluable for voice communications consultations between doctors and field medical teams, and it included the use of HF slow scan TV for the relatively new concept of telemedicine.
The popularity and sales of The Big Dummy's Guide To CB Radio fueled the launch of the Book Publishing Company's new printing presses, and provided much-needed income for The Farm at a crucial time in its growth.
