December 30, 2015

Today I came home to a wife who had a bad day.

So I took her out to pick up trash off of the farm for an hour on a dry thirty-six degree early evening. Poured champagne down her throat for every trip to the dumpster. Then we wandered in the cold for fifteen minutes.

Her day, and mine own, was greatly improved.

December 27, 2015

Christmas 2015

Carmen is having babies in January

We're not on the Farm yet. But if you consider that last year at this time the Farm was deep in the future, not something real at all. A dream without form.

This year we came far. We found the place by accident. For some reason able to find the owner and buy the place. Now the dream is real, but only on one edge. The chore is to bring the whole thing into the real world.

My New Year's resolution this year:
Build a house and move my wife and dogs into it before next Christmas.

December 16, 2015

Great news. House Bill 320 goes into effect in January. This allows us to build our kitchen and sell our food products without commercial licensing until we get busy enough to need a commercial kitchen license.

December 15, 2015 - Puppies on the way!

So we're excited about this. Our first litter. 

Part of a much bigger plan. 

The bigger picture includes moving everyone out the the Farm and new kennels, but this takes money we simply cannot earn any other way except by breeding the high value "crop" of Basset Hound Dogs. Step one (collect underpants) was to purchase good breeding stock and enter into the professional Basset Hound breeding business. In this we intend to be successful; but it must be re-stated, emphatically, that this exploitation of living things (moral patients), as a resource, was always intended to be the first step toward building a better place for us all. Finding the Farm property was always intended to be step two. We got is a bit backward, but in the end the plan is taking shape as we intended.

Morally this is might be questioned. 

So I offer this explanatory bottom line answer to any moral concerns:

• We intend to be farmers in the very real business of farming and exploiting animals is a part of that. Even cute, cuddly, happy, warm, friendly, long eared, and playful animals will be exploited at our Creekside Farm.

We only hope that everyone understands that we give our dogs (livestock) the best home we can afford, all they love and respect they need, and seek to find homes for their offspring which will be loving and safe.

Puppies on the way!

December 13, 2015

Found an interesting article "The Market Gardener" on Mother Earth News today. The guy operates a 1.5 acre farm which produces enough to keep a family of four comfortably.

Gives me hope. I bought the book.

The Market Gardener

December 7, 2015

We haven't had much opportunity to get out to the farm for a few weeks now. Winter is setting in and money must be saved. But today brought record rains so we had to go see what three inches did to the creek.

Normally the creek has been at about a foot, deep in a ravine about sixteen or twenty feet deep. Today the water was six or eight feet from the top. An amazing amount of water.

November 16, 2015

Today I had to go to the farm and dig a hole. . . A place for Lizzi-Beth's plum tree.

I have to say that the ground I found there is absolutely the best digging earth I have ever dug. It is deep and the loam is exquisite. No mud, even on a rainy day, no clay, great aeration. Went down three feet in fifteen minutes without having to cut anything. Nothing like the Massoula flood muds found everywhere else in Washington county.

There will someday be a very good farm there; the earth is good; the roots will go deep.

November 15, 2015

The clock is ticking.

Clark Bar Griswald (AKC) and Caramel Corn SanDiego (AKC) sealed the deal a few times in the past few days. This is a good match for excellent Basset features, gentle temperament, and ought to improve the breed.

Carmen

Clark Bar

We expect that if she took we will have the prettiest batch of Basset Babies around January 18 next year.


If all goes well then there will be babies in March. They will be available under contact terms and ought to bring between six and twelve hundred dollars, plus delivery fees (if any).

November 14, 2015

Another small step today. Can't go into it but it is important.

November 3, 2015

Just keep on doing the little things and the big things take care of themselves. . .

Mr. Polscher's Pile

Today I took a basalt path out of a customer's yard. About a hundred feet of stone worth a bunch of money that no longer has to be found so that I can build the Crackpot Gardens. The pile is sitting near the well for the time being. I really don't have any idea of what it will eventually become, but it will most certainly turn out glorious.

Hopefully there will be a bunch of this stuff happening in the next five years. God and the universe is on my side.

November 2, 2015

We got the preliminary floodplain engineering application today. After I pay Terry Hsu, the engineer, we can begin the permit process. Another baby step completed though.

October 27,2015

Really nice thing happened today.

A lady I was working for gave us about a thousand green Mondo grass plants and about a hundred black Mondo grasses. She also gave me this beautiful tree, but I have to move it this winter.

I ordered planting flats and baskets from a nursery supply store so that we can break the grasses up and flat them for the winter. Eventually these will be planted as plugs and will fill in pretty quickly if the conditions are good.

The green Mondo grass plants grow about two inches tall and exceptionally thick so they tend to choke out unwanted guest plants. They look like lawn, but without the mowing. I don't know how much foot traffic they might bear . . .

The black Mondo grasses grown about nine inches tall and need a bit of tending once or twice a year, but they are a nice grass to soften borders between high and low plantings, and the color is good for defining transitions. They also have a nice little purple flower too.

Adventuring in Hood River

We went out to look at orchard farms in Hood River, Oregon today even though it was very rainy and a bit blustery. Had a great time and learn a bit more about what we thought might work at our farm. Nearly as I can tell there is nothing like what we wish to build our in the are where we are building; but the stuff we hope to build is working well around Hood River.

This is Draper Girls. The first place we went to and probably the best name. They had a homey feel and did the best job selling apples. because they put little dishes of cut produce on top of the bins. They had no heat, on a cold day, and no lights or places to sit. The gaps between the temporary rain shelters dripped horribly. But they had a thriving business and sold hot cider and donuts as well as apples of fifteen varieties and pears.

Draper Girls had a few antiques
and a bunch of canned goods. 

The best apple they had. $1.50 a pound.

About twenty parking spaces at Draper Girls, good turnover because nobody was there for more than fifteen minutes.

Probably the best looking barn store was Packer Orchards. They had thirty parking spaces and the turnover was a bit slower owing to massive grazing opportunities.  Under the white canopy was a jelly and jam tasting space. Two tables of people dipping and spreading.

This was the cookie display with tubs of cookie bits to try.
$1.50 for a five inch cookie, good quality too.

The pies were expensive.

A great display space with plenty of traffic flow space.
The way they tagged the jars was a favorite.
Mixing in the produce with the products and findings worked well too. 

This is a display from another farm store.
Probably more effective but the prices were very high.

Comparing this to my favorite store, what we get is a homey looking thing
which used the space well,  the same tag schema as Packer Orchards, 
better prices, and overall did a better job at retail marketing.

Packer had some seating areas.
Nothing that would make people sit down.

They also used table space well.

This was Isikawa Family farm. Est. 1911
By far the most commercial of the places we visited. Loads of parking.

Perhaps the best marketing as well, since they got us there with promises of hard cider and heirloom apple tasting. The place was packed with pretty girl staff and people buying large bags of apples. They had a great deal of vegetable produce as well as beans and preserves.

But other than the produce, they were doing a much bigger

scale project than we are. Their focus is getting people there.

The best approximation of what we wish to build has no uPick orchard, strange for the area;
but they had food, seating, music, and a ton of things to see and do.

Apple Valley Farm-store had everything we would want except for the produce.

They had a cool farmhouse.

Great retail displays with pretty good product placements

And prices that seemed about right.

With exceptional variety.

Overall it was a nice fall day with a long drive up the gorge. We bought some great apples and drank a bit of the cider we found there as well.

Most of the stores had product, but it was fairly easy to tell that retail wasn't the primary focus for most of them. A few had customer involvement programs, some had gift box shipping. All had home made products and something like garage sale antiques. None had the scope of products we hope to have.

What all shared was an area which celebrated it's produce and produced a map cooperatively which people were traveling out of Portland to follow. Even on a fairly sucky day, there was great foot traffic.

We have water!

I don't know the particulars yet, but the pump guy says we have good water. So the pump works and there is enough flow. But that is all we know as of today.

October 18, 2015

We went out to look at the Leech Botanical Gardens today. Sort of a dreary day, but not rainy or cold yet. They were practically empty, but also setting up for a wedding ($6500 venue).

The place was an old estate which had been deeded over the Portland Parks and Recreation, who may have let the place slip a bit. You could see the bones of the place were still there, and it might have been better in Spring rather than fall, but overall there was not all that much to learn from having gone.

Our idea about walking trails is there, and it works well too. They had a good idea for fencing off the creek from the creek side path, and a few seating and gazebo ideas as well. We got a bunch of images about native plants, and a few ideas about bamboo, but nothing of the layout will be of much use.

At least it was free and they had a good gift shop.

This brings us to October 9, 2015

October 10 is when we began burning. The long hot summer was over and the burn bans were lifted. But this certainly isn't the end of the story. Just the middle of the beginning.

We have contracts, but still don't own the land because the probate proceedings that the woman we are buying from still need to be completed, then the ownership can pass to us. This requires a small estates affidavit, which I have written, and a waiting period. Until then we are both on hold, and moving forward, with the projects.

So I have been working up ideas about what to put there, making this historical blog, designing the building plan, and learning about farming, chickens, plants, gardening, etc. . .

Yesterday was our twenty-third wedding anniversary.

Legal-eazy . . .

After beginning to clear the land I needed to find a way to secure the property legally. The problem became:

1. The woman who was selling me the place didn't have her name on the deed.
2. There was a will, but nobody seemed to have a copy of it.
3. I had no money to buy it even if I could.

I dug around for a while inside of the shipping container, looking for a copy of the will. We found a bunch of documentation, but no will. There was a letter from the lawyer claiming to have written it and a business card as well. So things looked good until I found out that the lawyer had died, his office closed, and we hit another dead end.

Some time went by before I began looking for another way through this all. We could see all of the way, every way, except for the way to buy it. So I dug into the stuff I already had, looking for a clue.

Eventually I found a clause in the tax seizure law that said that once there was a judgement for seizure. any relative could redeem the property by paying the tax, a penalty, and a fee. I thought they would deed the property over to the person making the redemption, turns out I was wrong; but I did have enough confidence to make a plan to pay the taxes. Eight thousand dollars I simply didn't have and couldn't see a way to get. So I put a fund raiser thermometer on the refrigerator door and we began saving. We needed eight for the county, one for a lawyer, and one for the woman who was signing the contracts.

By late August I could see that we would have the money for the taxes, might have the money for the woman, but there would be no way to have the Lawyer money, so I began studying up on writing the contracts myself. Turns out I would have made a good lawyer.

We paid the taxes and filed the contracts with the County with three days to spare before they would have taken the property for good.

Cleaning the place up . . .

After securing control over the land, a gamble to say the least, we decided to invest some time and money in beginning to clear the berries and mowing the place.

This is a westerly view from the gate.

We rented a tractor from the Kabota dealer in Forest Grove. Shelled out about four hundred for a little tractor with a loader on the front and a really large brush cutter hanging off of the back. Ann loved driving it, but there wasn't much time for it. We got about half of it cleared in the eight hours we had paid for. All of the east and west meadows got mowed and a ton of stuff was pulled out of the trees. We also got a chainsaw and cleared a ton of little trees and any of the lower branches that got in the way. 

The white lines are the corners

The idea wasn't to get it all cleared, just to get some idea of the thing itself because there was no place from within the fence that you could see the dimensions. The fences were all covered in berries, the ground covered in berries, the trees . . . Covered in berries.

I lost about a pint of blood driving through all of the berries, but we made substantial headway even though you wouldn't have been able to see to the back of the place. I cleared the entire front fence line and under the walnut tree. Cut down a dozen big branches off of the walnut tree. 

The shipping container as seen from the gate.

Eventually the thing began to look tamed.

We broke the first tractor. Eventually we had another tractor day, and got a guy out to start taking the mobile homes and motor home apart. We got the place cleared all of the way to the edges.

We broke the second tractor too. But you could now see the fence all of the way around, and the corners from most of it. The trash became obvious and we knocked down some structures that needed it. I cut down a few dozen scrub trees as well. 

The Dream of a Creekside Farm

Our Dream as of 2015

The Current layout is a trash pit . . . But this is what we want to build in our dreams.

1. The green areas with the yellow lines are uPick organic peach and pear orchards. Each line is about ten feet from the next, each square is about fifty by seventy-five feet. Between each line we will run chicken tractors for what we hope someday to become an organic meat chicken cooperative. Along the yellow lines, between the row, we hope to put raised be flower and vegetable planters. All using innovative watering systems and completely covered over with fourteen foot tall hoop houses to protect the growing environment.
2. The red checkerboard part is our uPick Strawberry barrel farm. About 150 barrels.
3. The fucia things are the barn and the farm house. The barn is mainly being built to become a farm store where we hope one day to serve food and sell stuff retail.
4. The red dots are gazebos for people to sit around in. 
5. The azure blue square is our greenhouse where we will sprout plants and someday maybe even have weddings.
6. The large brown areas are for our egg farm, hatchery, and kennel. The egg farm will be separate from the meat chicken thing except that we may get our chicks from there.
7. Each of the fifteen beige ovals is a garden suitable for having your picture taken.
8. The medium blue area is the fruit stand. This will be among the first things built to serve customers.
9. The yellow rectangles will be gypsy caravan guest houses where one day we might have a BnB.
10. Everything in grey is walking path or a parking area.
11. The lite blue areas at the top are water features.

Needless to say, it will either be very easy to build if the money is there and the County allows it, difficult to build otherwise.

October 14, 2015

The nameless and the homeless . . .

To recap:

1. We found a place that was too small, but in a good location. And it had no house.
2. We found someone claiming to own it, but after seven years in her car might be crazy.
3. There was a large and growing property tax debt and it might not be too long before the County does something about the debt.
4. We had no money (none) to do anything about any of this. 
5. Other than this stuff, and a feeling that we were maybe heading in the right direction.

Flash forward about two months. We had met with the woman and I had done a bunch more looking around.

It took a few weeks to find the woman that owned the property. To be honest I am not at all sure that finding her was possible. I went online and looked up tax documents, real estate listings, and everything else I could think of. I found out that the property taxes were unpaid for years, the owner was deceased, and that a citation had been issued because of all the trash, but nothing led me into finding out who owned the property. I found a woman's name listed as daughter, but searching for her name led me nowhere. I did a genealogy of the last name in the area, and it looked promising, but wound up a dead end as well. Ultimately I found her through a Oregonian article from the last decade which gave me a business name, from which I found a web site, which I contacted, who had an old email address, which led to finding the woman living in her car for over six years. But the woman we bought the property from a woman that had no way to go so far as gaining any benefit from the property:

1. She had inherited the land, but had no money to file paperwork to transfer the deed into her name so that she could sell it.
2. She had lost everything she owned and was living in her car for years before we found the property.
3. The County was months away from taking title to the land in a tax foreclosure.
4. There had been other people interested in finding her, but all were waiting for the Couty to foreclose so that they could buy it at auction.

So if we hadn't come along, finding the place by accident, she would not have ever received any benefit. If I hadn't been doggedly determined to find out about the place, she would have received no benefit. If we would have walked away, no benefit.

The fact is that we found something we couldn't walk away from for good and bad reasons. The place was too small, no house, etc. . .  But the woman needed help, the land needed help, we needed land, etc . . . So we made the deal, knowing it was a awfully big gamble and that any number of things could happen and we would loose all of our investments. But the risk, along with the benefits of buying the place should all go well, and the side benefit of helping the land and the woman, all added up to a winner if we won, and a bit lesser looser if we lost.

The land needed us.

The woman needed us.

We needed the land.

We could not get out of helping the woman.

All else aside, we couldn't have run away from this whole thing, would have if we could have, but could not. So our stars aligned with hers, we made the deal.

So this became a moral challenge . . .

I'm not going to bore the readers with a long and detailed drawing of the scene we found. I just need people to understand why I say this farm project has become a moral challenge. So if you are interested in right and wrong, good and bad, read on. Otherwise read the next post.

These were the moral issues involved:

• What we had found was land that was abused. 
• We had found that the owner was in distress.
• There was at least something in it for us if we went forward. 
• We had the means to do something about it.

So we had to do it because this important moral principle was at stake: If someone can do some good thing without sacrificing something of equal moral consideration, then they ought to do it.

Dr. Singer's principle can be extended to land and biome stewardship as well, but you would have to take the course in environmental philosophy and I don't recommend it. It is safe to say that if people find themselves in the position to protect their environment, any bit of it, then they ought to do it for the sake of everyone else providing they don't sacrifice something of greater moral consideration..

Not only this, but there are other important moral principles at play: In the Kantian sense I was not using the homeless woman as a means only to my own ends, so it was okay, and if everyone did stuff like this then I think the world would be a better place, so I was probably doing the right thing. While Hume would say that the greatest good for the greatest number would be the homeless woman no longer being homeless, our family gaining the farm, and the world getting this great place to go and be. And if we were thinking of Locke we would have to say that wasting of the land is morally reprehensible, so we are at least trying to do the right thing by Locke's standards.

All of this combined: It would have been impossible for me, a Senior student of moral philosophy, to have walked away from the homeless and helpless woman, the hopelessly distressed land, and the good financial deal we found. Even if I could have done so, I would have needed to hand the problem off to someone who was more able to help or find myself in a moral hazard. And since there was an eventual pay-off for us, the land and our dream of Creekside Farm, I was not sacrificing sufficiently to say that this was anything other than a neutral moral object. Even an avowed cynic would not be able to say I was doing this solely for my own gain, but one could ask the question.

Twenty years from now I want people to know that the entirety of my personal fortune was achieved doing rightful action according to substantial moral principles.

But Politics is not the issue . . .

Political philosophies are how people strategically get together and get along. We are political in the sense that we want to get along and have a concise viewpoint on what it means. But at the heart of this farm is the underlying philosophy that, as much as possible, we want to give it all away and serve people. We want them to eat well and recreate themselves. So that is what our actions will look like.

Reminding the reader that our intention in late Summer 2012 is to eventually build a wedding venue, and that we have so far succeeded only in obtaining three Basset Hounds to breed as part of the bigger plan, we can leap forward a year or so and talk about January 2015. . .

We had at one time found a suitable property for the Farm project. In fact I had looked at a suitable property every day as I drove to school prior to the Summer of 2012 when we decided what we wanted to do. But the property I had seen and based all of our plans on had sold to another couple and so the plan remained even if we needed another place to put it. But the money wasn't there to buy in January 2015 and more than it was there to buy in 2012, so we would have to wait until at least June of 2016 before our next move. But the story got interesting in January 2015 despite our thinking and planning.

We decided, just for fun, to drive around north-western Washington County on a Saturday afternoon in the rain and see what some real estate listings looked like. I looked up some listings and guessed at a route that would take us by as many as we felt like looking at without getting out of the car. We were not at all serious. We drove past four or five places, each cheap, each with a multitude of problems and good points, just to get a feel for what might be available. But while driving towards the highway to Vernonia a sign caught my eye which was not in the listings I had looked up. So we circled back for a look. The picture above represents what we found. A fence with very bad gate.

But we aren't the type of people who just see things and decide what they are. So we went through the bad gate and looked around, fully believing that we might be wandering into a crack den, or hobo camp. This is what we found.

Most people would have just run away at this point. Our story is much much stranger and all the more marvelous.

We couldn't see how large the place was, it was buried under years of trash and vegetation. I thought that maybe this was a County repossession or something equally interesting since there was no way anyone else would ever even consider buying it. But there was an old real estate sign laying in the ditch by the bad gate, and the place interested me for some reason. 

We walked around, picking our path carefully, trying to figure out the story of the place with very little evidence.

There was a gate at the back.

And a creek.

And the place was covered in old fruit trees of some sort. The was a meadow to the east, another to the west. And, if you subtracted the trash from the scene, the place had a certain charm which was hard to describe. But we did like it right from the start.

There was little to go on. The real estate sign was very old and the company didn't seem to be involved in selling the property anymore. So I decided to dig into the place's records a bit and try to figure out what it was.

There wasn't much to see, but Washington County has a good GIS system which showed that the taxes hadn't been paid for nine years (a good thing for me to find). Other records showed me that the place was about two acres (too small), and in the right price range. And I could see for myself that the house had been burned down (part of the story, but what happened?) and this led me into finding out that the owners had died in a house fire in 2007. Curious-er and curious-er. So, even though it was too small, my interest was peaked. And so I decided to dig a bit further.

After a few more searched I found a citation that the County had issued on the property complaining about the trash, and the citation had another person's name associated with the property, so I dug into finding that person, looking for an heir and expecting to find some farmer in the area who didn't want to take the time to fix the place up. After about a weeks of tracking people down, I did find an extended family of people with the same name who fit my hypothesis; but, even though it did lead me to finding an entire family of farmers of the same name, didn't lead me into finding the name I was looking for. So the search continued. 

Long story shortened by about a month's time. . . 

We found the owner, or someone who called herself the owner, living in her broken down car, in southeast Portland. She had been there for nearly seven years.

Political action . . .

Politics is a contentious issue . . . That is the design of all things political. People need to get along and politics is the mediating thing we use. But we are not a political action thing, we are farmers. But if we look at the ideas in the previous posts, and the ones in the posts following this one, we might be able to give the reader some idea of what our political ideology is.

We will operate this farm as thought we were Republican Libertarians because this is the best way to maximize the profits we have to give away. We will operate as Socialists in the means we use to assign the benefits of what we will give away. These three political ideologies do not contend with each other, in fact they may work pretty well together. But it will take an open mind to get what I am saying here. First a few definitions:

A Republican is an advocate of a republic, a form of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law- Wiki

Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association, and the primacy of individual judgment. - Wiki

Socialism is a social and economic system characterized by social ownership and/or social control^[1] of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy. -Wiki

We have no problem with government, in fact we like the idea. It is only the contemporary practice of government where we find fault. We support government, but as liberals we wish to maximize out freedom of choice and exert our judgement over our own lives. All of this for the good of the society we are a part of and with with we could not do without. None of these values says we cannot engage in Green energy projects, in fact they insist on it. None of these ideologies insist that we refrain from organic farming practices, they demand it. And none of these ideas dictate how we should spend our profits, they work together well to enforce our ideas of how we should spend the profits for a better society overall, and a better society locally.

If government could spend the money better, we would not hesitate to pay taxes to support it. So our political action is liberal at its core and proud of it. This is how things ought to be, but presently are not now, in the political sphere of the United States.

Keeping it all for our own use . . .

In considering how we can give it all away, remember that there is a virtual line in the tax system. On one side of the line we can keep everything, on the other side we have to pay it to the government. It is our intention to walk that line conspicuously and so we intend to improve our lives through the products of our labor as much as we can. It is also our intention to improve the lives of everyone we work with, and for, as much as we can. It is not our intention to give the government anything we can get out of giving it. To that end we believe that investment in ideas that build a better farm are better than paying taxes:

1. We hope to build a solar powered farm so as not to pay electrical bills.
2. We hope to create a water stabilized environment where we do not need to import water.
3. We hope to create a sustainable biome where we don't need to pay for chemical fertilizers.
4. We hope to use everything to it maximum so that we don't have to pay for dumping waste.
5. We hope to do all of this without much Bank debt, so that interest payments don't deplete our labor efforts.
6. We hope to keep Government permissions for what we do out of our business.

In these ways we hope to give more of what we earn away and not to give it to governments, utilities, and chemical companies, all of which will use the money in ways we might not appreciate. This kept money can then be distributed as we see fit, invested in people or capital improvements, or given away to those who need it. Which brings us to a political question.

Other people should be our business too . . .

We went to some farms around the Portland area, searching for idea about farming and what we wanted to do with our far (should we ever be blessed with one). Most of what we saw was too small in scope, or much bigger than we wished to do.Remember, we want to eventually build a wedding venue, not just a farm. And also keep in mind that this is a bigger vision that either a nice place to gather or a nice place to get food. But one thing leads into another and so every step must be considered in advance of need. Some of the farms we saw had glaring holes where opportunity lie.

One thing I abhor is wasted opportunity. And since I intend to build a uPick farm (a place where people come to get personally involved with their food) I looked at what others were doing with the idea. In nearly every case I saw the same lost opportunity . . . They wasted a lot of food in their orchards by allowing food to hit the ground and rot. Row after row of peaches, pears, apples, what-have-you, fell from the trees and was lost. We resolved to try and stop this loss to mankind. But what to do?

Here are a few ideas we think might help, each taking on a life of its own and opening other opportunities for increasing the use of the land sustainably:

1. Put down some sort of ground cover to keep the dropped fruit from being damaged beyond use.
2. Pick up the downed fruit and use it in products to sell whenever possible. (Converting these lost objects to cash allows for more good in the world.)
3. Preserve these found products so that their benefits might be used out of season.
4. Give away as much as the tax system allows to feed people who need fed.

Each of these things opens another business opportunity, makes clear the need to add more aspects to our business as it grows, and perhaps shows others that farm practices can be improved for the benefit of more than just the farmer his or her self.

We want to give it all away. So how do we maximize what we have to give? First step is to not loose the opportunity to have gifts to bring. The Second is to minimize the things we need to exist comfortably. . . 

People should be our business . . .

Nothing in our national make-up dictates that Capitalism need only work for profitable enterprise where every last dime is rested from the work of others or the last ounce of energy taken from the land. In fact, Adam Smith never said anything of the sort and he was working in a system much the same as Americans find themselves working today: a system where landed gentry are exploiting the land and the people to their own maximum benefit and to hell with the world in general. But Capitalism is not to blame. Greed is to blame. And this greed is both held centrally by a few, and held collectively by many of us who only wish to retire without fear of homelessness and hunger. The people of the United States support the system because they simply have no choice. And there doesn't seem to be any way out of this bad situation without accepting some very bad outcomes. Our collective economic fairies will die if we decide that they don't exist, so we keep clapping our hands . . .

Our farm won't cure what is wrong with the system, but perhaps we can do better for those people who come to us to work. So here is our employment model proposition:

1. We will pay the maximum we can pay to those we hire.
2. We will hire as many as we can without making idle hands, to the point of unprofitability.
3. We will support our peoples' lives in every way we can with as many benefits as we can.
4. And after so period to be determined later we will give our people a lifetime share in ongoing profits. Allowing them to retire, or to continue being involved.

In this way we will eventually give it all away. The entire farm will become employee owned: the lion's share of profits will come to the farm managers (who will retire to other lives every ten years), the employees will be taken care of commensurate with their loyalty, and we will be allowed to help people long after we are gone.

We want to give it all away. And this includes anything we produce which in excess of that we can profit by and split with the people who produced it. And it just so happens there is a plan for giving away the excess too.

How to give it all away . . .

Let's face it here and now: The United States is a horrible place to live if you want to live a moral life in the year 2015. (A bold statement not intended to win friends, but instead intended to get the reader's attention.) Our country picks fights, manipulates markets, and bullies the world with it's might, and does the same thing to its own people. Corporate America has the upper hand and not much happens here except that which is allowed by our oligarchical overlords. Not many people on Earth like our government, but most like our people and wish they were us (even though some of us are not very likable). It is the people of the United States who will decide whether we will continue to proceed as bad actors in the world or become what were once were. And the people of the United States are essentially good heart-ed and full of good will, and have always been that way. SO what has this got to do with our desire to give it all away? Simple!

The tax laws we work under are set up to allow a great many things which can be good for the world, or bad, depending on your ultimate goals. There is within this tax system mechanisms which allow us to give away a certain amount of profits. This amount is a balancing between keeping all the money and paying a tax on it, or giving away as much as you can without going past the amount you would be allowed to keep. So the idea is that we will make all of the money we can, but give every dime away by paying people too much and donating any other excess production to worthy people and places. This should allow us to maintain the good life while doing all the good in the world that the tax law allows. But our idea doesn't stop there.

We think we can extend this good will past our retirement if we can give the farm away to other people. So what we think might happen is that we will find some other couple to give the farm over to and take as our retirement a share of the ongoing profits, but not the capital wealth of the farm. These new farmers will enjoy the benefits of their new lives just as we did and retire after ten years with their own share of the ongoing profits, then find another couple to run the place, etc . . .

I know it sounds far fetched. But it could happen if the stars align, God wills it, or we all get lucky.

But this idea brought me to another, and another, ad infinitude.

What about the employees? Don't they deserve better treatment than the modern American employment model can give? Well certainly they do.

Why we do what we do . . .

There are myriad reasons for our wishing to go into this project, but the most primary reason was that we are both goal oriented and need to achieve things in our lives in order to be happy. Simply stated: our lives have to mean more than just our own personal desires. So we talked about the underlying philosophy we wished to engage in while thinking about, building, and operating the farm. One of our discussions centered around a lottery ticket.

We don't buy lottery tickets much simply because the lottery is a tax on those who don't get what statistical mathematics does. You have approximately the same chance of picking the winning lottery number as you do of picking the winning lottery ticket up out of the gutter in front of your house. But it remains that, no matter how improbable, people actually do win the lottery.

However, other than buying the ticket, the people who win do nothing which effected the outcome. How they bought the ticket, when they bought it, what method they used to find the numbers, made no difference what-so-ever to the outcome. They simply threw the money down the lottery hole and out came the millions all on its own. This brings me to my point: We buy a lottery ticket when the money is sufficient to achieve the goals we have for the money, knowing that God decides if we get the money and this brings me to my only insight into God and how God works in our lives (a necessary digression):

I am not at all religious and don't care at all whether you are or not. As a philosopher and rationally minded person I know with certainty that belief in things that you don't understand is superstitious nonsense. But still it remains that I have this belief which underlies all of my thinking and moral choices. Superstitious or not, rationally accountable or not, there is this feeling that I am part of a greater whole, and there seems to be a great deal of rational thought that has been done through the centuries on defining what this greater whole is, how it works, and what can be done about it. I have read many of these thoughts, enough to know that: If God can be defined, then God can be defined as that which cannot be understood cognitively by any human mind.

So if someone wins the lottery, 

and people do, 

AND we cannot effect the outcome of our statistical probability for winning,

and we cannot, 

then God, as defined above, as that we cannot understand,
must have been involved in our winning (if we win).

Buy the ticket and maybe you will win, but probably you will lose. So if you win the probability was that you would not. If you cannot understand this, but still need some means of believing there is anything other than wildly random chance involved. . . You can rationally rely on God if you have this definition to fall back on.

Back to the ticket conversation. . .  The question was: If we win, what do we do with the money? To which the answer eventually came that we would travel the world and open soup kitchens to feed the homeless and hungry. (Awhhh!) The idea was to go stay in cities we haven't stayed in, find locations where we could put expensive soup cafe locations, but also where the back door could become a free soup cafe. Serve both doors the same soup, but allow the front door patrons to feed the back door customers in a sort of self sustaining enterprise where we received no benefit other than good will. We would go forth and find the place, the people, and the food. Then put the whole thing together, give it to someone to run, and move onto the next place. We could learn about the city in depth and live out our lives in philanthropy. So one might think this is our ultimate dream, but how does it effect our farm planning.

This is simple: We want to give it all away!