In the autumn of 1970 a convoy of about sixty converted school buses, vans, and trucks left San Francisco carrying roughly three hundred people on a four-month speaking tour of the United States. At its head was Stephen Gaskin, a former Marine who had seen combat, then taught English at San Francisco State, and who since 1967 had been running an open weekly gathering called Monday Night Class that by 1970 was drawing up to two thousand people to hear him talk about spirituality, psychedelics, comparative religion, and how one ought to live. Somewhere on the road the tour became something else. By the time it returned to California the people on the buses had decided they were a community and needed land, and they worked out that pooling everything they owned would buy about fifty acres in California, or rather more somewhere else.
On 9 December 1971 they bought just over a thousand acres of Tennessee ridge and hollow near Summertown, in Lewis County, at seventy dollars an acre, later expanding to around seventeen hundred and fifty. They called it The Farm. Over the next twelve years it grew to something between twelve and fifteen hundred residents, making it the largest commune in the country, and it produced a body of work out of all proportion to its size: it put tofu and tempeh into the American diet, revived out-of-hospital midwifery across the Western world, and ran an international relief organisation that won the Right Livelihood Award. It also, by October 1983, could not feed itself, was in serious debt, and voted by roughly nine to one to abolish its own economic system. The reason is a straightforward incompatibility between two of its founding commitments, and it is the cleanest example of that incompatibility in the whole record of intentional communities.
Monday Night Class
Gaskin is worth understanding because the community’s shape follows from what he was doing before it existed. Monday Night Class was not a congregation and he was not a minister. It was a free, open, unstructured discussion held weekly in San Francisco during the years when the Haight was disintegrating, and its defining feature was that anybody could walk in. There was no membership, no fee, no doctrine to subscribe to, and no screening whatsoever, and the audience grew to the point where it filled large halls.
The caravan itself deserves a moment, because four months on the road did something no founding document could have. A group that has driven sixty vehicles across a continent together, broken down together, been moved on by police together, and fed itself out of shared pots for a third of a year arrives at its destination already welded, with a functioning informal hierarchy, a set of habits, and a shared story. Most communities begin with strangers and hope familiarity will follow. The Farm began with several hundred people who had already survived something together, which is a substantial part of why the early years worked as well as they did under conditions that would have dispersed a less bonded group within a winter.
That is a particular kind of institution and it produced a particular set of habits. Gaskin’s authority was personal and spiritual rather than administrative; his role was to talk and everyone else’s was to listen and argue, and the entire arrangement was premised on radical openness to whoever turned up, which in San Francisco in 1969 meant a great many people in serious trouble. When the caravan formed and then became a settlement, it carried that premise with it unexamined. A weekly discussion group can admit anyone at no cost, because attendance consumes nothing but floor space. A community holding land and feeding people cannot, and the transition from one to the other happened on a bus somewhere in the Midwest without anybody noticing that the terms had changed.
The Farm and Voluntary Peasantry
What they founded in Tennessee was framed explicitly as a spiritual community rather than an economic experiment, and its economics followed from the spiritual commitment rather than the other way round. Members took a vow of poverty. Everything anyone owned went into the common holding on arrival, personal ownership was abolished, and the community supported each member from a central fund. The Tennessee Encyclopedia’s account of the settlement describes the resulting arrangement as voluntary peasantry, undertaken to demonstrate shared abundance, which is exactly right and exactly the phrase the founders would have used.
The scale of the undertaking is easy to underestimate at this distance. Several hundred young people, most of them urban, none of them farmers, arrived in December on unimproved wooded ridgeland with no housing, no water system, no sanitation, no electricity, no road network worth the name, and no agricultural knowledge, and set about supporting themselves on it. Within a few years they had a functioning water supply, a clinic, a school, a store, a motor pool, a soy dairy, and hundreds of acres under cultivation. Whatever the eventual accounting, the sheer construction achievement of the first five years at The Farm compares with anything in this literature and considerably exceeds most of it.
The physical circumstances were genuinely hard. People lived in the buses they had arrived in, in army tents, and in structures they built as they learned to build, on land that was steep, wooded, and unimproved, in a Tennessee climate that is hot and wet in summer and cold enough in winter to matter when you are living in a tent. They farmed, badly at first, and were vegan by conviction, which meant soybeans, and the community’s engineering, construction, and water problems were solved on the job by people learning as they went, which is the ordinary condition of anyone who has ever tried to build a settlement from nothing, as the record of what gets constructed under difficulty shows, and it depended entirely on getting the basics of land and water supply right. Nobody on the place had any money at all, and that was very much the point of the exercise.
The Open Gate
The second commitment was openness, and it was not incidental. The Farm was a spiritual community whose founding conviction was that you help whoever shows up, and it acted on that with real seriousness for more than a decade. People arrived continuously, in large numbers, without appointment. The community ran a free ambulance and clinic, took in runaways and pregnant women who had nowhere else to go, and famously offered to deliver any woman’s baby free of charge and raise the child if she could not, an offer made without conditions and honoured repeatedly.
The birth offer deserves to be stated in full because it is the clearest expression of the community’s founding logic and the clearest illustration of its cost. The Farm undertook to deliver any woman’s baby free of charge, to shelter her while she was pregnant, and, if she could not raise the child, to raise it at the community’s expense and return the child to her at any point in the future without question or condition. That is an extraordinary thing to offer, it was honoured, and it saved lives. It also constitutes an open-ended financial and human liability accepted from strangers, with no upper bound, by a community that had no reserves.
That is a genuinely admirable position and it is the reason a great many people are alive and well who might not otherwise have been. It is also, considered as an admissions policy, no policy at all. There was no application, no probationary period, no assessment of skills, no requirement of contribution, and no mechanism by which anyone could be told that the community was full. Thousands of visitors came annually by the early 1980s and a substantial number stayed. The self-organising settlements that have managed something similar have generally done so without a shared economy underneath, as at the free town in Copenhagen. The gate stood open as a matter of principle, and by every account nobody who arrived was ever turned away.
The Common Purse
And underneath the open gate lay the other commitment, which was total. This was not income-sharing in the sense of contributing a portion; it was the abolition of private property within the community. Members surrendered their assets on joining, held nothing individually thereafter, drew what they needed from the collective, and worked at whatever the community required without wages. Businesses generated by members belonged to the community. Anyone who left, left with nothing much, which meant the arrangement was also difficult to exit.
It is worth being precise about how total the pooling was, because it differed in kind from the arrangements at communities that survived on a shared economy. Twin Oaks operates a labour quota with an internal accounting system that records what each member contributes; The Farm had no equivalent ledger. Contribution was expected, expressed spiritually rather than numerically, and never measured, which meant that the community had no way of knowing, even in principle, whether any given member was drawing more than they added, and no way of discussing it except as a question of somebody’s character. Where there is no measurement there can be no correction, only resentment, and losses that accumulate unrecorded inside a trusted institution are exactly the sort that surface late and all at once, as the forensic literature on internal accounting failures describes.
Pooling of that completeness has real advantages and the community experienced them: no member could be individually ruined, resources could be directed wherever they were most needed, and enterprises could be capitalised from the collective without recourse to banks. It also creates an obligation running from the community to every member for the whole of their subsistence, permanently, and that obligation is what makes the pooling arrangement so sensitive to the composition of the membership, in the way that any structure holding assets in common requires clarity about who holds a claim on them, as the great examinations of ownership and entitlement illustrate. Everything a member owned went in, and everything the community had was shared out.
Two Policies That Cannot Coexist
Here is the mechanism, and it is arithmetic rather than sociology. An open gate and a common purse are individually workable and jointly impossible, because each new arrival is an immediate and permanent claim on a fixed pot, and there is no mechanism by which the pot can decline the claim.
The asymmetry between the two commitments is worth spelling out, because it explains why the problem was invisible for so long. An open gate produces its costs slowly and diffusely: one more person is never the problem, the marginal arrival is always affordable, and nobody can point to the day the community became unsustainable. A common purse produces its benefits immediately and visibly: a member in difficulty is helped this week and everyone can see it. So the arrangement generates continuous, legible evidence of its virtue and only gradual, deniable evidence of its cost, which is precisely the configuration under which an institution will keep doing something well past the point at which it can afford to.
Consider the two halves separately. A community with an open gate and no shared economy can absorb arrivals indefinitely, because a newcomer who contributes nothing costs the existing members nothing except space and patience; this is roughly Drop City, and its failure was different, being an inability to generate income rather than an inability to distribute it. A community with a common purse and a controlled gate can also work indefinitely, because admission is the point at which the community decides whether it can afford another claimant; this is Twin Oaks, with its three-week visitor period and membership vote, and it has run for fifty-eight years. What cannot work is both at once, because the open gate converts every arrival into an obligation and the common purse guarantees that the obligation is unlimited and permanent. The result is a growing denominator with no control over the numerator, and the outcome is not a moral failing on anybody’s part but the predictable consequence of a system in which contribution is voluntary while support is guaranteed, which is the free-rider structure in its purest form and one that any group must solve somehow, as the study of cooperation and its exploitation and the social dynamics of resource-sharing groups both describe. A community can open the gate or it can share the purse. Attempting both simply establishes a completion date.
What They Built Anyway
Before the arithmetic caught up, and this is the part that makes The Farm remarkable rather than merely instructive, the community produced an extraordinary amount of durable good. Ina May Gaskin and a group of women who had learned to deliver babies on the caravan established what became The Farm Midwifery Center, one of the earliest out-of-hospital birth centres in the United States, which has attended thousands of births since 1971. Her book on the subject, published in 1975, became foundational to the revival of midwifery in the English-speaking world, the centre’s outcome statistics have been studied and cited for decades, and a manoeuvre for managing a particular obstetric emergency carries her name, which is believed to be the first such procedure named for a midwife rather than a physician. Whatever else The Farm did, it changed how a significant number of people are born, drawing on the practical physiology that underlies the science of bodies and their systems.
It is worth noticing that every one of these enterprises succeeded for the same reason, which is that each matched what the community actually had. It had several hundred people willing to learn, an unusual tolerance for unglamorous repetitive work, and an ideological commitment that happened to align with a genuine market opportunity. Midwifery required training and attention rather than capital. Soy foods required cheap protein and a willingness to eat it for years before selling it. Relief work required people prepared to go somewhere difficult at short notice for no money. The Farm was extremely well supplied with all three inputs and poorly supplied with capital, and its successes track that endowment exactly.
Alongside it: the community’s soy work, driven by a vegan diet and the need to feed hundreds cheaply, produced a cookbook in 1975 that introduced tofu and tempeh to a mainstream American readership, along with a soy dairy and a publishing house that is still operating. And in 1974 members founded PLENTY International, a relief and development organisation that ran earthquake reconstruction in Guatemala, established a free ambulance service in the South Bronx staffed by community members, and received the Right Livelihood Award in 1980. Those achievements rested on skills, institutions, and accumulated practice, transmitted person to person in the manner examined in the study of how knowledge passes between people, and the dietary commitments behind the soy work anticipated arguments now supported by research into animal experience. This was emphatically not a group of idlers. It was doing world-class work in several fields while steadily going broke.
The Strain
The pressure built through the late 1970s and became acute in the early 1980s. Population reached somewhere around fifteen hundred against a productive base that had not grown proportionately, and the community had expanded into commercial ventures, including agriculture and construction, that absorbed capital without reliably returning it, in the way that ambitious diversification undertaken to solve a cash shortage frequently deepens it, a pattern visible across the whole catalogue of ambitious undertakings and in the industrial ventures that fail on operating economics rather than on vision, as at Ford’s plantation in the Amazon.
The demographic pressure deserves separate mention because it is the part that no amount of effort could have offset. A community committed to home birth, opposed to contraception in its early years, and admitting large numbers of young adults will produce a great many children, and children are the one category of member who cannot contribute for a long time and whose needs are non-negotiable. By the early 1980s a substantial share of The Farm’s population was under working age, which means the ratio of producers to dependents had moved decisively in the wrong direction through a process nobody had chosen and nobody could reverse. The complaints about children’s living conditions were not incidental to the financial crisis. They were the same fact described from the inside.
The specific failures compounded. The community carried no insurance, so a serious medical event became a direct charge on the collective, and at one point a hospital lien was placed against the land itself. Debt accumulated past four hundred thousand dollars. And the internal complaints, which are documented and which matter more than the balance sheet, were about freeloading, about inadequate living conditions for children, and about the absence of any democratic mechanism through which members could influence decisions, together with a growing sense that expressing doubt about the direction was treated as a spiritual failing rather than as an argument. Marketing produce and manufactured goods into ordinary commercial channels, which the community increasingly had to do, exposed it to exactly the price and demand conditions that govern any producer selling into a competitive market and any operation dependent on input costs it does not control. Members were working. The arithmetic still did not close.
October 13, 1983
The decision, when it came, was made properly, which is worth emphasising because it is what separates The Farm from most communities in this position. On 13 October 1983 roughly three hundred voting members met and approved, by something close to ninety per cent, a restructuring that abolished the collective economy. It was called the Changeover, and by those who left, the Exodus.
The vote itself is worth pausing on, because it was not a schism. Ninety per cent of the participating membership approved a change that they knew would force most of them to leave, which is an unusual thing for any body of people to do and suggests the alternative was understood to be losing the land entirely. There was no faction that seized control and no founder expelled in acrimony; there was a meeting, a proposal, and a decision, followed by an exodus of people who in many cases supported the change and simply could not remain under it. Communities more often split than reform, and The Farm’s ability to make a collective decision this drastic without fracturing is itself evidence of a functioning institution.
The terms were specific. Each adult became personally responsible for their own living, earning their own income inside or outside the community. Members paid monthly dues to a central fund, initially around a hundred and thirty dollars, to cover shared costs and the land. Collective ownership of non-land assets was relinquished, while the seventeen hundred acres remained held in common. And the governance changed at the same time: the Council of Elders, which had possessed little actual authority, was replaced by an elected board of directors, and Stephen Gaskin ceased to have authority over the community’s financial decisions, a separation of spiritual from executive power that the community’s own retrospective account of why The Farm survived identifies as central. Removing a founder from operational control without destroying the institution is among the hardest transitions any organisation makes, as the record of succession crises attests, and it was accomplished here by a vote. The population fell from around fifteen hundred to about two hundred within a couple of years. Most of them could not stay under the new terms. That was the point of the new terms.
They Kept the Gate
Now the decision that makes The Farm genuinely instructive, because there were two available fixes and they chose the less obvious one. Faced with a common purse that could not sustain an open gate, a community can close the gate, which is what most would do and what Twin Oaks had done from the beginning: institute admissions procedures, cap the population, and decide who may claim on the collective. Or it can keep the gate open and abolish the claim.
There is a further reason the second solution suited this community specifically. Closing the gate would have required someone to sit in judgement on applicants, and everything about The Farm’s history, from Monday Night Class onward, made that intolerable: the founding conviction was that you do not turn people away, and an admissions committee is a machine for turning people away. Abolishing the purse required no such judgement. It changed what membership consisted of rather than who could have it, and it therefore left the community’s central moral commitment intact while removing the liability that commitment had been generating.
The Farm chose the second. It did not become selective. What it did was sever the link between membership and support, so that arriving no longer entitled anyone to be maintained, and consequently the community no longer had to control arrivals in order to control its liabilities. Membership was converted from an entitlement into a cost, and once membership costs money rather than paying it, the number of members regulates itself without anybody having to sit in judgement on anyone. That is a genuinely elegant solution and it preserved the value the founders cared most about, which was the refusal to turn people away, at the price of the arrangement they had believed was the point. Designing institutions so that the incentives do the sorting, rather than an authority, is the recurring lesson of experiments in governance, and the insolvency that forced the choice was of the ordinary kind documented in analyses of organisations that could not meet their obligations. They could perfectly well have started screening applicants. What they did instead was abolish the purse.
The Farm in 2026
It is worth noting what the land trust arrangement accomplishes, since it addresses directly the failure that destroyed communities like Kaweah. The seventeen hundred acres are held collectively and cannot be sold by any individual member, which means no departing resident can force a partition and no financial pressure on one household can put the land at risk, while houses and businesses are individually owned so that members can build equity and pass something to their children. That is a deliberate separation of the asset that must stay collective from the assets that work better held privately, and it took the community twelve years and a near-bankruptcy to arrive at.
The community is still there, on the same land, in its fifty-fifth year. Population sits around two hundred, on roughly seventeen hundred acres held collectively through a land trust so that no member can sell out from under the others, with members owning their homes and businesses individually and paying dues for common costs. The Book Publishing Company still publishes. The Farm Midwifery Center still operates and still trains midwives who go elsewhere. PLENTY International still runs. The Ecovillage Training Center, established in the 1990s, teaches solar, biofuel, and natural building techniques to visitors from around the world, which returned the community to something like its original purpose of demonstration, now conducted with the monitoring and design tools, including drone survey and mapping equipment, that were unavailable to people living in buses in 1971.
The generational question is the interesting one now, and it is a problem The Farm has handled better than most. Children raised there have gone away, and some have come back with skills and families, which is the transition that almost no intentional community manages, since a second generation inherits the arrangement without having chosen it and usually leaves. That The Farm has a third generation is partly a function of the Changeover: people who own their houses and their businesses can pass something on, and can afford to have their adult children move back, in a way that members of a common purse who own nothing individually cannot.
Stephen Gaskin died in 2014 and Ina May Gaskin continues to be among the most influential figures in her field. Second- and third-generation residents live there, some of them children born at the midwifery centre, and the community has become a fixture of the intentional-communities movement rather than an experiment within it. Very few of the settlements discussed in this territory are still occupied by their founders’ successors rather than being addresses recoverable only from the record, and fewer still lost ninety per cent of their population in two years and continued. The Farm did not survive despite the Changeover. It survived because of it, and the members who write about it now say so plainly.
What Survived the Purse
Strip The Farm to its structure and the finding is a constraint that applies to every community that has ever tried to be generous. An open gate and a common purse are each defensible and together insolvent, because free entry into a shared economy means unlimited liability with no control over the number of claimants, and no amount of goodwill, effort, or spiritual commitment alters that. The Farm ran both for twelve years, did extraordinary work while doing so, and hit the wall exactly where the arithmetic said it would, at the point where population growth outran the productive base and the complaints turned to freeloading and to children living in conditions the adults would not have chosen.
The test this yields is short and can be applied to any group that intends to be both open and generous. Ask whether joining creates a claim on collective resources, and if it does, ask who is empowered to decline the claim and on what basis. Ask whether contribution is measured or merely expected, because an expectation with no ledger behind it cannot be enforced or even discussed. Ask what the ratio of contributors to dependents is and which direction it is moving. And ask which of the two commitments the group would give up if forced, because that question will be answered eventually, and it is better answered deliberately than by a creditor.
The second finding is what the crisis revealed about which parts of the enterprise were load-bearing. The Changeover destroyed the collective economy and drove out four fifths of the residents, and it did not touch the midwifery centre, the publishing company, PLENTY, the soy work, or the accumulated body of practical knowledge about building, birthing, farming, and disaster relief. Every one of those survived, because each was a skill or an institution rather than a transfer, and skills and institutions do not depend on a common purse to exist. That is what places The Farm among the most useful entries in the catalogue of utopian societies. What The Farm actually gave the world turned out to have nothing to do with the arrangement that nearly destroyed it, and everything to do with several hundred people spending twelve years learning to do difficult things extremely well.