If it’s true that the community that farms together, stays together, members of the Southampton Community Organic Farm will never be in want of some company. And as our own Brian Halweil learned when he visited the farm in the Spring of 2006, the bounty of these mostly hobby-farmers’ company is dwarfed only by that of their harvest.
“The members, who are predominantly women in their sixties and seventies,” writes Halweil, “succeed at remaining remarkably young at heart. Perhaps it’s the slow, steady physical activity of mini-farming that’s particularly suited to older bodies or the wide open sky, scent of freshly turned soil, and rare ‘ocean breeze’ that members joke about on hot days.”
It could also be what Halweil calls the “pleasant chaos” that grows beside the farm’s asparagus. “Because everyone shares in the management and labor,” he writes, “no one person has to be on the payroll or drop their entire life for the farm . . . It’s a form of enlightened communism that would make Marx blush. And it’s a learning experience for everyone.”
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