We are saddened to report that Earthaven Member Brian Love passed away in March of 2015. Brian contributed enormously to the agricultural and technological development of our community, contributed countless hours of creative design, planning, management and physical labor to land-based and building projects across the village, and was an active leader in numerous committees and Council. Among his many notable achievements at Earthaven, he leaves behind the beautiful farm and home created in the Gateway neighborhood. His official obituary is available here.

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Matthew Fox visited Earthaven October 17, when he filmed interviews with some of our elders and young people for an upcoming video about “Youth, Elders, and Spirituality.” While visiting, he held a discussion with the community. Matthew Fox is an internationally known author, speaker and visionary who has inspired many Earthaven people. Matthew Fox Website.

Dominic Barter visited Earthaven on November 25 and led a presentation about Restorative Circles, a process he developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived for the last twenty years. A Restorative Circle is a community process for bringing together the three parties to a conflict—those who acted, those directly affected, and the wider community. The process ends “when all have been heard and understood, and actions have been found that bring mutual benefit.” Restorative Circles Website.

Earthaven Builders Complete Projects

ArtiSun Construction, led by Brian Love, finished the Friedwald residence. According to Henderson County building inspectors, this house is the first entirely off-grid, certified residence in their jurisdiction.

Round Mountain Builders, led by Mihaly Bartalos, completed Rudy Ballentine’s house in the Middle Rosy Branch neighborhood of Earthaven. This and the ArtiSun project both feature Earthaven lumber, and innovative techniques devised by our member-builders. They also employed many Earthaven residents and neighbors.

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Farmer and NikkiAnne in front of the MicroHut (Farmer’s residence at Earthaven) at Gateway Neighborhood. Photo taken Summer 2010.

On Tuesday night, Nov. 16,^,

Earthaven member Chris Farmer (often called “Farmer”) threw a farewell dance party in the Council Hall and said goodbye to Earthaven . . . at least for now.

“I’m leaving for the indefinite future,” he told friends in the packed Council Hall.  “I may be back, and I’d like to come back, but I’m not making any specific plans about it.” He’ll be living in Santa Barbara, California, close to his sweetheart, an environmental activist and former Earthaven work exchanger. Farmer has been an Earthaven member for 13 years.

Chris Farmer (left) with Brian Love.

One of Earthaven’s earliest advocates for agriculture, Farmer is co-owner with Brian Love of Gateway Farm, as well as their business, ArtiSun Construction. He co-founded the Forestry Co-op (1998- 2004): felling trees, mastering timber-framing carpentry, and innovating the use of a geopolymer concrete substance as well as a wall-truss system with wood milled from thinner trees.  He built a timber-framed 12’ x 12’ x 12’ “micro-hut” with chip-slip walls in the Hut Hamlet, and later built a similar hut in Gateway neighborhood in the hybrid natural/conventional style he and Brian innovated.

Farmer has stimulated and entertained Earthaven members, friends, neighbors, and visitors with his “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “Clueless Honky,” and “Open-Source Mythology” raps. (See videos.)

Farmer in a large goodbye hug at his farewell party.

Farmer was Earthaven’s Firekeeper (president) in 2007, where he lead us in dealing with state officials re water quality and distribution standards. He has served on Land Use/Site Planning committee and on the ad hoc Council Document committee, and is one of Earthaven’s best facilitators.

We’ll miss you Farmer. We wish you all the best!

Earthaven member Diana Leafe Christian is an internationally known ecovillage activist, author of Creating a Life Together and Finding Community (New Society Publishers), and publisher of Ecovillages newsletter. Click here for her website.

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Chris Farmer and Brian Love are the two main builders of Pokeberry Hill, a two story dwelling built using ecological principles.

Farmer started by noting that many innovative building techniques are used at Earthaven, including a house at Bella Via using cob, adobe brick, and plaster, and the  Medicine Wheel house that uses lots of recycled materials – plywood from pallets, metal beams from railroads, and recycled flooring.

Stud framing

“Brian and I are fans of stud framing. We used 2×6 low-quality poplar felled here at Earthaven for the framing. Studs are the basis of the cheapest, easiest walls and are especially efficient for a complex building with plumbing, electrics, closets, and cabinets. This is a complex building, but the studs went up in a week.”

Q. What about using recycled plastic for framing?

Farmer: Recycled plastic beats treated lumber, and it’s certainly rot resistant. But we have lots of timber at Earthaven. Here, we air dry the wood then treat it with Boracare, which is low toxicity, to make the wood resistant to termites, powder post beetle, and other boring insects.

Heat

For insulation, we spray cellulose (paper) into the walls – the thermal index of the ceilings is around R23 –to R25, and the walls, R50. The walls are finished with earthern plaster – clay and lime. We used natural finishes – plant waxes and oils.

We put in concrete countertops. We don’t like Portland because it takes so much energy to make it, but we wanted this second story room to have lots of mass to store heat from the sun.

The building design maximizes passive solar heat. The south facing windows get no direct sun in the summer due to the overhang. But in winter the sun is lower and floods through the windows. The heat from the sun is absorbed by the floor (a floating concrete slab) and the countertop.

On the north, there is wood flooring, and on the south, cement. Underneath the floor, there is the potential for radiant heat. Also, insulated pipes bring hot water to heat the floor. In the winter, on sunny days, it’s warm enough to warrant cracking the windows.

Q What about noise?

The building is not as noise proof as we hoped. We’ve been running band saws which does disturb the folks downstairs. Ah well, the music lovers will have to curb their taste for loud.

Q What are your power sources?

Earthaven is entirely off the grid, relying on a small hydro-electric plant and solar panels for current while maximizing passive solar for heat. Pokeberry shares solar panels with the Village Terraces building. Most appliances run on 24V DC, including the lights, the refrigerator, and ventilation. There is a huge battery back up, storing the power. There are also AC outlets, powered by DC current run through an inverter, but the inverter is susceptible to lightning.

Q. Would you build elsewhere?

We prefer to build in and around Earthaven, but if there is work further away, we can go there. We have a box truck with solar panels (name of truck) and a storage battery. There is also a 200 amp fire truck battery. The truck runs on bio diesel.

Our goal is to improve our cash flow to the point that we can retire to farming and raise turkeys, sheep, and vegetables. This year we are growing a lot of squash and melon, and raising Icelandic sheep and turkeys.

Q. How many rooms are there?

There is the big open room, including a kitchen alcove, that runs practically all the way across the southern exposure, a bedroom, two small offices, and a bathroom. It’s basically a 1,000 sq foot, three bedroom house.

Cost

Building on ecological principles, everything takes longer. And it is all hand done – all the wood panels are joined as is the carpentry. The building itself costs $125 per square foot. About half of cost is labor.

The downstairs tenant comments, “It’s beautiful, and it is so quiet here.” The notetaker responds, “At least when the band saws are off and the building is done.”

Chris Farmer is a full member at Earthaven, a builder, and a farmer at Gateway farm.

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Yellowroot Farm in the Hut Hamlet is up and running again, with seedings for what will become lush and vibrant biodynamic vegetables. (See “Yellowroot CSA Begins Second Year”)

In late April, Cailen Campbell’s goats, April and Luna, had their kids, and now moms and kids are sharing a pen in front of the Tribal Condo in the Hut Hamlet. Cailen, Lee, and Mihaly rotate the grazing of their animals at various sites around Earthaven, including the Village Green, the fallow side of Yellowroot Farm, and the “New Lumberyard” site near Gateway Field.

Recently a crew of loggers and farmers, including Brian Love, Mike Odel, Chris Farmer, Mihaly, Cailen, and work exchangers Galen Ballantine, Drew Hoffman, and Bruce Johnston, further cleared the New Lumberyard site and prepared it for grazing. The logs from the trees that were felled were milled as lumber for the Pokeberry Hill duplex at Village Terraces (see “New Buildings”), and the stumps were left in the ground. The pasture was fertilized with organic fertilizers and planted in perennial grasses and clovers. This one-acre site (called the “New Lumberyard” because it once was going to be a lumberyard), is ideal for grazing rather than crop cultivation because it’s on a slope and too steep for a tractor, has stumps, and is north-facing.

Last spring, Brian Love and Chris Farmer (known as “Farmer”) started their four-acre integrated-agriculture project, Gateway Field, by clearing four acres of forest, adding organic soil amendments, and growing and tilling under two “green manure” cover crops. Their next step is a grass rotational pasturage system with Icelandic sheep, and probably endangered heirloom breed turkeys and chickens. This requires a sturdy fence to protect livestock and provide a fixed point for attaching lightweight moveable fencing for when the animals are sequentially moved around the field in the rotational grazing system. This spring, with the help of Mike, Bruce, Galen, and others, Brian and Farmer built a 2220 ft fence around their field, using woven wire fencing attached to charred locust posts every 15 feet. They’ll soon add two electrified wires around the perimeter to complete the fence, and, perhaps as early as November, will bring in their small herd of sheep.

Last fall, Michaeljon Drouin and Andy Bosley converted an existing pond along Rosy Branch Road, just uphill from the hydro station, into a trout pond. They built up the dam so the pond would hold more water, and ran more water into it from nearby Rosy Branch Creek. “Trout need cool, aerated water to survive,” Andy says, “and raising the water level and increasing the pond size meant we could grow more trout in the pond.” In late March of this year Michaeljon and Andy stocked the pond with 200 3-to-5-inch rainbow trout purchased from a regional trout breeder. “By April some of the largest trout sited were already 7 to 8 inches long!” Andy reports. The plan is to begin harvesting the trout when the biggest ones are about 12 inches long, perhaps by mid-July. The trout will be sold to Earthaven members and neighbors, and Michaeljon and Andy will experiment with making smoked fish for longer-term preservation.

Michaeljon and Andy are currently arranging with the Forestry and Agriculture committee to create a second larger pond downhill from the first, in order to expand their aquaculture operation.

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The bright, creative thinking and dedicated, diligent work of Chris Farmer and Brian Love are the stuff of future Earthaven legends. Folks are always wanting to know what amazing things they’ve been up to. Considering their plan for Gateway Field, we will probably not be disappointed, as it promises to maximize their potential.

In these times, we need people with legendary resolve, tireless energy, multi-dimensional intelligence and a strong work ethic. While growing with remarkable success, Earthaven is still facing huge insufficiencies, not the least of which is a lack of inherited skills.

The homesteader skills of our great grandparents have been lost. Now, the skill a ten-year-old would have taken for granted a century ago, we must gain through trial and error. Of course, many people at Earthaven have resolve, energy, intelligence and a good work ethic (not necessarily in legendary quantity). Nonetheless, we have been slow in tackling the far-reaching problem of dependable alternative energy. Most of us have been entirely occupied with other important work, including the building of our own living spaces, that we often have just had to go on the hope that eventually someone with the right skills and knowledge would take it on.

Thank goodness, Brian and Farmer are doing just that! In their own words, they have already begun the intensive project of creating an integrated system where logging, milling, and building residues provide power for biofuel production… [with their] wastes…used as high-protein feed supplements for pasture-raised livestock [that]…fertilize the field…for vegetable cultivation.”

It will be a while before the whole program is in place and producing. In the eight plus years that Farmer has been at Earthaven, he has been doing what neede to be done while planning and preparing for this project. This time was not wasted.

Though Brian arrived on the scene just four years ago, he truly hit the ground running. His brilliance, exuberance, and physical endurance were just the support Farmer needed to renew his resolve. Helping him to make use of the things he had learned in his years at Eathaven.

In our last two issues, we wrote about our new “Sweat Equity” policy and also about “Sustainable Systems” (which focused primarily on Farmer and Brian’s work truck/power source). These articles described how these men established the foundation that would allow them to carry out their plans within the limiting context of a self-supporting, off-the-grid community such as ours. In the relatively short time since they signed their lease for the Gateway field, they have cleared the acreage, processed and stored the wood, acquired their water tanks, built an impressive barn, plowed under their first two cover crops, planted a third cover crop, and constructed a significantly-sized pond. Therefore, in spite of insufficiencies (or because they are so aware of them), Farmer and Brian are helping us to face a more promising future.

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Farmer and Brian’s amazing truck is a moveable tool shed. Its shelves house tools, building supplies, desk, file cabinet, vice hose and cord reels. It contains a collapsable chop saw and a table saw (these are super moveable, rolling in and out of the truck). Eliminating the need to build a tool shed for every site, the truck provides for super efficiency, adaptability and on-site organization.

They also chose to increase their investment by installing photo-voltaics in (and on) the truck, as a way of modeling sustainability while building our “green” homes. Their inverter produces pure sine wave/high quality AC power feeding a huge 800 lb (12 volt) battery array. Choosing a diesel truck gave them biodiesel options. They replaced the original alternator with a 200 amp model that has an excellent “bottom end,” (meaning it can produce a lot of power at idle), the kind normally used for fire trucks and ambulances.

Farmer and Brian employ permaculture principles with this redundant system: they can charge their battery by idling the truck on biodiesel, or by powering their battery with solar panels. The solar panels are under warranty for 10 years, with a life expectancy beyond that. The batteries are under warranty for 25 years. Up to now, solar has been their primary source of power, and running the truck is saved for special cases, such as blowing in cellulose or running a grinder.

How does all this translate into benefits for these Gateway neighborhood developers themselves? As they see it, the benefits include the fact that they and their customers don’t have to listen to a generator all day. Their high level of efficiency and organization also equals considerable job security. They will be able to build whatever they want for themselves. And, most important to them, they can remain within the limits of sustainable right livelihood.

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