Last potluck of the year *and* National Solar Tour

The last of our open-house potlucks for 2019 is Oct. 5, 4-8 pm. Please come if you are interested in living and/or farming here, or just to connect, stay in touch, enjoy the farms and home, and hear more about what we are doing.

During that weekend, homes and other solar installations around the country will open their doors for people to see, get inspired, and learn more about what it takes, what it looks like, and just what it’s like to live solar. So we’ve added this open house to the National Solar Tour, so there will be more emphasis on the solar, energy efficiency & conservation, and carbon farming aspects of life at Listening Tree.

If you are interested in Listening Tree Co-op owner-membership,  but the Oct. 5 date doesn’t work for you, please call to arrange a tour at another time.

No lords, no serfs

One of the most disturbing social trends (and there are so many) unfolding beneath our feet here in the US is farmers being priced out of land ownership. Since former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz infamously demanded, “get big or get out!” millions of small farms foreclosed, went bankrupt, or got pushed out of the business. Agribusiness replaced agriculture: Wendell Berry sounded the alarm of the Unsettling of America. And now it’s getting worse.

Many middle-class hippies who went “back to the land” in the sixties and seventies could  afford to buy a little farm, but not necessarily to make a living at farming. Today, most US farms lose money. An unbelievable 95%, according to Agricultural Justice Project. Most small farmers are subsidizing the local organic food movement with second or third jobs. Milking the goat or weeding the garden is our third shift. Meanwhile, agriculture brings in almost $60-70 billion a year. What’s wrong with this picture?

Everything. The price of food has almost nothing to do with its value or the cost of growing it–labor, land, inputs, or environmental externalities. Food that kills you is cheaper than food that nourishes. The entire economy is so twisted, that the land we need to grow the food we need to live is valued orders of magnitude higher for building new houses or box stores, even in a state like Rhode Island, where there is enough housing for the people who are here and malls are empty.

But most concerning is the trend toward tenant farming, and even worse, young farmers commuting to their rented farmland. Rhode Island’s young farmers not only can’t afford a down payment on their farm, they can’t even rent a farm with a farmhouse. Besides the unsustainability of the driving, there’s the psychological disconnect from the rhythms of the land they steward, and the disincentive to take care of the soil for the long term.

Soil is the–shall we say–bedrock of organic farming. Healthy soil feeds healthy plants  that can resist insects, disease, drought–all kinds of trouble. But building healthy farm soil is a multiyear project, and if a farmer doesn’t have land tenure–know they can stay on their land as long as they like–there’s always the threat that their investment in soil could be taken away from them when comes time to renew a lease.

When we were looking for the land that became Listening Tree, aware of these issues, we consulted with Equity Trust, the Cooperative Development Institute, and other food movement groups to develop our structure as a limited-equity cooperative, with 10 share holders, each able to negotiate an agreement with the group regarding stewarding a part of the land for their own farm or other land-based business. Those agreements will ensure land tenure, after a trial period of one growing season, while both farmer and household can ensure they are ready to commit to stewarding this beautiful land.

The co-op owner-members use a kind of consensus process to ensure decision making is collaborative and fair. Together, we’ll adopt agreements with interested members for “farm shares”–ownership shares that include living here plus a commitment to use and take care of specific fields of the farmland. Farmer owner members will be responsible to the community, but will be able to run their own business without fear of losing their land.

Springing forward

Jim finished building the chicken tractor, a coop on wheels, that spreads the fertilizer wealth around.

Winter was supposed to be a time of planning and looking inward, but weather kept calling us outdoors and we spent a lot of it in spring chores–expanding the garden, getting the fence started, finishing the chicken tractor, and weatherizing and putting up walls in another tiny cabin.

Then the seeds arrived, and the hens, and the chicks! It’s a chirp-fest over here, and seedlings are reaching for the light already.

I (Karina) have grabbed this rainy day to research some more about financing cooperative shares–for people who can’t afford to buy a share outright but want to become a full member. One option is for the coop to borrow and lend to its members, who would pay the co-op back over time, such as through a home equity line of credit through the Cooperative Fund of New England, and another is to find lenders willing to loan directly to members, such as National Cooperative Bank. While on their website, we found this cool guide to buying a housing cooperative unit or share.

A Happily Solar Solstice!

Winter solstice might have seen the Listening Tree shop roof covered in snow, but instead solar installers were up there installing photovoltaic (PV) panels! To add to the excitement, the crew was a RI-based co-op startup, Sol Power. One of the cooperative movement principles is for co-ops to cooperate with other co-ops, so we’re happy to support each others’ success.

The system is grid interconnected, meaning when we produce more than we need, it will feed back into the electric grid and power our neighbors, and our meter will spin backwards. When we need electricity, instead of relying on batteries, we’ll use green power coming through the grid, through People’s Power & Light, the local nonprofit green power provider.

The PV system is rated at 12 kilowatts, meaning that at maximum capacity (sunny noon on the summer solstice) that is how much power it can produce. Sol Power expects the 42 panels to produce about as much electricity as we estimate Listening Tree residents and farmers will use, including irrigation, a well pump, a couple of electric cars and a heat pump water heater.

I would be loathe to waste good champagne on christening the array, but maybe we can raise a toast at our next potluck, Saturday, Jan. 2. at 4 pm.

Application process, apple processing, and next potluck

We’ve been processing apples, winterizing our first tiny cabin, and developing the process for people to become members of the coop.

We have recently completed an application process for prospective residents/farmers at Listening Tree. It is our intention to carefully build out our community in a way that helps to realize our vision and creates a diverse, balanced and compatible membership. Currently, we seek one or two residents, or perhaps a small family, as well as a market farmer. If you or someone you know are interested in exploring Listening Tree as a place to live, please contact us to get more details (we ask that you review our vision statement beforehand). We can send you the application questionnaire we have developed as well.

Thank you for your continued interest in and support for our cooperative.

Meanwhile, our neighbor’s apples keep flowing into the kitchen, and we’ve collected the astounding array of apple processing paraphernalia you see here.

All of which is to say please don’t bring apples to the next potluck! Firming up to be Saturday, November 14 at 4 pm.

ListeningTree.Coop

We’ve secured the domain name “listeningtree.coop”–and will be setting up an email list to keep you up to date on what’s happening at the homestead.

UPDATE: since Listening Tree Co-op folded, we’ve reverted this website to the free domain name and are keeping it archived at https://berryberrydayhomestead.wordpress.com.

 

Why a Cooperative?

Listening Tree has decided to form as a cooperative because we resonate with the cooperative principles and see coops as the proven alternative to extractive economic structures. We will never need to “grow or die,” and our decisions will be made democratically, by consensus. We will be co-creating the restorative economy within the extractive one.

We’re finding a lot of people don’t really know what a housing coop is. It’s like a condo, only you don’t own the space of a separate home or unit. You are granted instead the right to use your private space (bedroom or office) and own the property in common.

We’ve also chosen this structure because we deeply believe in the cooperative principles, which you can find outlined here, especially  “concern for community: while focusing on their needs, cooperatives work for sustainable development of their communities…”

Limited equity coops are also a proven way to keep housing affordable. Here’s an example in New York. Burlington, Vermont also has had great success with them. That is the model we are leaning towards.

Sharing a kitchen and bathrooms–in contrast to the cohousing where everyone has their own house and the common house–means it will be affordable to buy a share in the coop now, too. It will also use less resources, and turn us towards each other as we share meals daily.

7 cooperative principles from NRECA

Turn it into an ecovillage?

won’t you be our neighbor?

We’ve heard over the years of planning the coop from people who like the idea of community, but for one reason or another, don’t like the idea of shared kitchen and bathrooms in the big house with satellite private bedrooms in cabins or sheds. That’s the model we chose and there are reasons why; yet other models are available, like cohousing and ecovillages. We have the opportunity to do both right now because there are two houses within eyesight of the house we bought, and both are for sale.

The reason we love our one-kitchen model for Listening Tree is because it:

• draws people together everyday, at least for meals;
• with private space in separate buildings, it gives each of us a chance to be together or alone as needed;
• wanting to be more community focused, we like how this architecture will counter our cultural conditioning to turn back to the nuclear families or single life we are accustomed to;
• it is far less expensive than cohousing;
• the sleeping/living space doesn’t need to be heated when no one is in it, because it will not have plumbing pipes that can’t be allowed to freeze;
• one washing machine, one kitchen, a couple bathrooms vs. one each saves a lot of other resources, including embedded energy;
• reduce conflicts over sleep schedules compared to living in one big building;
• no more “you like to sleep with the window open, I like to sleep with the window closed, so good bye, goodbye, goodbye”–as Paul Simon said. To each her own.

But if you value cooking alone, eating whenever you want, private meals with family or partner, yet still would like to be part of our larger community, living in the neighborhood might be the perfect solution. Right now, two houses are for sale literally a stone’s throw away.

You could be our neighbors, and would be the closest part of the co-op’s broader community.

Update, Sept 2018: these houses have been purchased, but there is another for sale through Long Realty just a few houses up the road.

New name!

 

It took a good, long, collaborative while, but those of us living here have settled on a name. Listening Tree Cooperative. Or Lis’ning Tree Co-op for short.

While we were eating dinner out on the deck, the turkeys came by. Two mothers with seventeen adolescent turkeys have been roosting most nights in white pines close behind the house. They stage their awkward, flappy launches from our yard, one by one.

Wednesday morning I woke up early enough, and dawn broke late enough, that I heard for the first time the flock descend, again, one by one, to start their day. Now I’m listening every morning for their little gobbles and under-the-breath blurps and cackles and that I-can-fly-but-I’d-really-rather-not flapping.

I’m sure the trees have been listening all along.

 

Vision Statement

—June 18, 2018 update–

Community Vision and Intentions

Inspired in part by a series of open-ended conversations on the subject of ‘community’ hosted by Kerry Bergin, several of us, Karina Lutz, Phil Edmonds, Jim Tull and Kerry decided to take the step to create an intentional community. We started with a vision, roughly captured in this statement, compelled by the ways we see human community, the non-human world, our own psycho-spirituality, the pressures of peak oil and how the ecological, economic, and social crises intersect. We are led by the call to regenerate small-scale communities – to retribalize, in a sense – bringing likeminded people from otherwise different racial, ethnic, religious, economic, sexual, generational and ability profiles and backgrounds to live with and support one another in our material sustenance, personal growth and learning, celebration and grieving. We recognize the challenges of community living under the influence of the dominant culture, with our conditioning to value individualism and privacy, but we also recognize that community living has served our species well for 99% of its years on earth and where it is still in use. To return to community may be difficult for us now, but it is not ‘utopian’, in the sense of being idealistic and impossible. We believe, on the contrary, that commitment to the global, industrial system (dependent on continuous growth, splintering communities, etc.), as a way to meet social and ecological needs, is unrealistic and untenable.

We will participate in community regeneration because:

1. We want to consciously choose to create a more sustainable way of life;
2. We miss each other and deserve the happiness of being together with our friends and families;
3. We need to experiment with self-organizing social systems at this time of energy descent (post-carbon transition), particularly in non-hierarchical ways;
4. We want to test alternatives to the root cultural causes of ecocide. For example, we want to dissolve the culturally fabricated walls erected between individuals, couples and families, between generations and classes, between humans and non-human nature;
5. Tribal communities work better for humans as a form of social organization than do mass, hierarchical alternatives;
6. We can no longer afford to move our bodies and our lives so fast, and desire in any case to slow down. Transition from peak oil to sustainability means both scaling down and slowing down;
7. And we can take care of each other more easily and naturally if we live together.

Two of us purchased a farm located at 87 Reservoir Rd, Chepachet (RI) in June 2015. In order to balance the need for and efficiencies of community with the need and desire for solitude and privacy, we envision creating small, cabin-like shelters (including retrofitting existing outbuildings) for sleeping and other alone-time activities. We will share one kitchen, and will prepare and serve dinner, at least, in the shared house to all residents on site each evening. The house will also provide shared office/farm work space, other sleeping rooms and a convertible guest room. At this point, we envision a community of 10-15 residents will live on the farm eventually, but the current septic allowance for this property is 6 individuals. Our plans to convert to composting waste treatment we hope will allow for more residents. Other practical, procedural and logistical features we intend to include:

1. Regular community meetings and conflict prevention and resolution/management processes;
2. A participatory democratic decision-making process, such as “consensus minus one” whole group decision-making, with ‘sense of the group’ practices leading up to final decisions;
3. Simple living, energy conservation and material cycling (e.g., compost toilets, rain capture, passive solar and super-insulated (e.g. Passivhaus) buildings and renewable energy systems);
4. Growing food for the community (and others when possible), using sustainable farming, hunting and gathering, such as permaculture and wildcrafting practices; and possibly a market-farm partner on-site.
5. New resident screening process and trial period;
6. Opportunities for agreed-upon community mind/body/spirit practice and also an acceptance of a variety of individual practices (yoga, meditation, prayer, etc.) or none;
7. Sharing responsibilities and work of the homestead, allowing for the particular skills members bring to the community as well as sharing basic chores, etc.
8. Sharing many things, such as meals, cars, appliances, kitchen, laundry, bathrooms, etc., to conserve resources and make community living more affordable than single-family housing. However, this is not an income-sharing community, i.e. a “commune.” Private ownership of cars and personal effects will be allowed and rules for borrowing established by the owners.
9. The cooperative as a whole will own and share the common house, barn, appliances, solar power equipment, tractor, many tools, etc. Rules about sharing will be developed through the group decision making process (see 2).
10. A market farmer or farm family could buy a special share that designates a portion of the arable land for market farming, to be stewarded by the farmer(s) in contract with the housing cooperative. See below for details.

Our community aspires to provide educational service to the state and beyond. We will promote and conduct workshops (Karina and Jim currently facilitate deep ecology – the ‘Work that Reconnects’ – workshops, as an example) and host apprentices who will live with us for a summer or semester to learn community life, food and shelter provision and about local/global transition to sustainable living more generally. We may choose to partner with an existing nonprofit organization to help raise money, recruit apprentices, and provide high school or college credit.

We would like to ensure affordability and equality by setting up ownership as a limited equity co-op. The limited equity co-op is an alternative legal ownership entity which allows people to buy into the property and own shares of the co-op and thereby be given rights to live there and use designated and shared space for living and working. A share grants holders the right to live in and otherwise use the land and structures, but also to transfer this right by selling their share to others at the price of initial purchase (or whatever the market will support if less than the purchase price). Unlike a condo, the co-op community has the right to accept or reject new members when shares are transferred.

Young families could own one share per adult. As children mature, parents could buy them their own shares to have the permanent right to live in the community with their own space. Members could also buy shares for their parents as desired. We would like the community to be intergenerational and balanced.

Non-shareholders might rent from shareholders on a sliding scale determined by the community, and permitted to live with us on a case-by-case basis. Apprentices could be provided free housing and food and be expected to work a specified number of hours each week.

A market farm partner would have a special contract with the community as well as being members of the community through the purchase of their own co-op share(s). The market farm business would be owned independently by the farm family. The contract would provide the security of land tenure to the farmers and would allow the community to choose another farmer if the farm family retires or moves away or otherwise is ready to transfer the farming rights to another farmer. Other land would be designated to be used by community members for the subsistence needs of the resident community.

In further service to our belief that we belong to the land, it does not belong to us, and that houses are primarily for shelter, not investment, the community may also decide to remove its property from the speculative market and conserve it through a land trust and/or selling development rights to the state. Such an arrangement would also serve to preserve the land and the farmer partners’ land tenure. Portions of the property may be designated for farming, open space, or residential uses.

Karina and Jim are purchasing the property and will hold title until the co-op is created, at which point they will begin to sell off shares (raising funds for property improvements, tools, etc. and payback loans). Our intention is to transfer private ownership to the limited equity cooperative once the sale is complete, the co-op structure formed, and members are ready to buy in.

This statement of intent and vision is a start, a stepping off point for further evolution and revision. We look forward to the new ideas and refinements new community members and experience will bring to the process!