Notes from an Intentional Farm Community

Abstract

First paragraphs:

Many of us have projects in which we build community around food. Community gardens, food hubs, farm-to-school, farmers' markets, expanding nutrition assistance, policy research and advocacy, and other such projects enhance nutrition, help build the local food system, and increase capacity of local communities. We pick a few aspects of "community" and a few aspects of "food" and tie them together. Josh Trought has taken many aspects of community and many aspects of food and tied them together in D Acres Farm and written about his experiences with this large project in the book The Community Scale Permaculture Farm.

D Acres defies easy categorization. It's a group of people living together on a farm, growing much of their own food and sharing their knowledge. Trought uses the term "intentional community" and "land-based service movement," since "collective" and "commune" bring to mind too many distracting concepts and images. He is looking to do no less than develop a new model for small farming, an alternative in the sense of ag practices but also an alternative to the family farm for those not part of a farming family. Revenue is derived from sales of farm-derived products, educational programs, and grant funds. This book summarizes the experiences of building and operating this entity; this review is about the book, not directly about the entity it describes....