Ira Wallace is one of the co-founders on Acorn Community as well as a driving force in Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Acorn’s business. Here she talks about the importance of seed saving at the Black Farming: Community Land & Food Sovereignty Conference.
Agriculture
Conference Info, Ghee, Governance, Saving Seeds, and Starting Communities
by Raven
This particular week in early May on Facebook was unusual in the while it didn’t do well at all in terms of viewership for most of the week, it ended with a very popular question.
We started off with a post from the Communities Conference folks.
Click here if you want to read the rest of the article.
In spite of all the useful information here, and the fact that it got nine likes and two shares, it only got seventy-eight views, which was still better than most of the posts on this week.
At East Wind they found a use for the surplus cream.
Again, I thought it had useful information, and again, it didn’t do that well, with three likes (including one from East Wind Community) and a love, but only sixty-six views.
When I saw this post from the FIC, I really wanted to repost it, because I think that Yana Ludwig knows a lot about communities, including income sharing ones.
This post did even less well, in spite of three likes and a love from the Foundation for Intentional Community who also posted a comment thanking us for sharing this.
Finally, the week ended with a couple of questions, the first from SESE.
A good question and a lovely quote but it only got three likes and fifty-two views.
Finally, since I was running out of things to post, I thought I would try asking a Facebook question. They usually attract comments and a bunch of viewers and this one certainly did.
Here are the comments it got.
Ezra, a Twin Oaks member, linked to an enormous property for sale along the South Anna River in Louisa, Virginia, right between Twin Oaks and Acorn.
After a pretty poor viewing week on Facebook, this post did incredibly well, with only two likes, but fourteen comments and a share, and well over two hundred views.
Flowers, Tahini, Accomplishments, and Three Sisters
by Raven
This week we’ll look at what was on our Facebook feed the last week of April.
Twin Oaks posted about flowers and spring.
This post got six likes and three loves, but it also got less than ninety views.
East Wind Nutbutters was boosting their tahini:
Unfortunately, this didn’t do well at all, with no likes or loves and a mere thirty-four views.
Serenity Solidarity posted about what they did in 2024, and it was impressive.
In spite of all of that, this post got two likes, one love, and only forty-eight views.
And finally, SESE posted about the Three Sisters, a popular traditional planting scheme usually using some type of corn, some type of beans, and some type of squash.
Maybe it was all the pictures or maybe there were a lot of folks who want to try gardening with the Three Sisters, but this post did very well, with eleven likes (including one from the Foundation for Intentional Community), two loves, two shares, and over a hundred and eighty views.
LEF March-April 2025 Newsletter
Living Energy Farm
March – April 2025 Newsletter
Easy Reaper Demonstration Day
One June 21 (June 28 rain date) we will have an afternoon event at LEF to demonstrate our Easy Reaper harvesting wheat, while also offering a tour of LEF’s energy systems. This event is being organized with the support of the Common Grain Alliance. Please sign up for Field Day Exploring Small-Scale Organic Grain Farming Equipment & Renewable Energy Solutions.
2025 DC Solar Training: Applications Due May 20
If you’re considering applying for this year’s DC Solar Training, get your application in soon! The application window will close May 20. The program will take place July 18, 19 and 20 at Serenity Solidarity Community, located a half hour from Albany NY. To apply, fill out the following form: https://form.jotform.com/250646742972061
LEF Partners with The Dogbane Movement Hub
We were pleased to be collaborating this year with the Dogbane Movement Hub, a
climate resilience education space and small farm in Ashland VA, just north of Richmond. The Dogbane Movement Hub is part of The Climate Mobilization, which organizes climate survival programs for low-income communities and communities of color around the US. Their goal is to build resilient infrastructure and essential skills that can support these communities through the coming climate shocks.
The first such program offered at Dogbane Movement Hub was a Water Survival Training, which happened this April. Richmond’s municipal water system has been in crisis for several months, so there is a clear need for autonomous water infrastructure. There were several experts at the training leading sessions on risk assessment, rainwater catchment and water purification. The LEF team led a session on solar water pumping, which included an installation of a solar water pump for the Hub’s new rainwater catchment system. This system will provide water pressure for their kitchen and bathroom during future events and workshops.
It was very exciting to get connected to so many amazing activists and community organizers in Richmond. Several folks at the event represented community gardens. Urban farms have emerged as a popular spot for applying direct drive technologies in cities, particularly water systems and refrigeration. A few years ago we installed a DC system at an urban garden in Caguas, Puerto Rico; this spring, we installed one at Dirtbaby Farm in Philadelphia.
It’s a logical fit- folks are already working towards community self sufficiency and self-determination, and often have both practical and idealogical motivation to keep their utilities separate from the city’s. It seems that the urban farming movement will likely be the first to introduce direct drive technology to the Richmond area as well.
LEF Featured on Nate Hagen’s Great Simplification
Living Energy Farm was featured on Nate Hagen’s Great Simplification show. Links are here:
Website: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/171-alexis-zeigler
Youtube: https://youtu.be/vTIaxj8gRRc
Substack: https://natehagens.substack.com/p/living-without-fossil-fuels-how-living
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7315705104920190977/
We have known of Nate for many years. He does an excellent job of producing high quality content related to the changes we face in modern times. We got more response from this show than any media ever produced in the last 15 years about LEF. We have been doing our best to respond to the many people who have contacted us in response.
Empowering Communities Book Updated
We have updated the book Empowering Communities very recently. It is at conev.org. It is less of a historical re-telling of how LEF was built but with more information about our technologies. Feel free to download a new copy, and to send us corrections/ suggestions.
Easy Reaper in Zambia
For about a year now, Kerry Clark from the University of Missouri has been promoting the Easy Reaper (the simplified combine harvester invented by Alexis) to agricultural equipment fabricators in Africa. Mostly her work has been funded by USAID. After USAID was downsized by you-know-who, Kerry was able to arrange some private funding to keep the project moving. While these new funds are not enough to pay for the rapid expansion of Easy Reaper production in Africa as originally planned, we have continued to upgrade of the drawings and instructions for building the machine. We have supplied these plans to a small fabricator in Zambia who works with Kerry. We are hoping that the detailed plans will make it possible for Easy Reapers to be built in Africa without Alexis having to travel over there. Work has begun on making the machine in Zambia.
The current Easy Reaper is the fourth iteration of the design, and it works pretty well. It is dramatically simpler than a normal combine harvester. Build One of the Easy Reaper was a much simpler than Build Four, and an abysmal failure. We have learned a lot in the last 10 years of working on this project. We are now working on Build Five, which is quite a bit simpler than Build Four and similar the original Build One, but incorporating lots of lessons learned since then. At our children’s insistence, the new machine is called the Grain Goblin. It would be sweet to have it running for a test with the upcoming grain harvest at the end of June, but we are pretty buried right now with spring farming and project management. Perhaps we will be able to harvest oats with the Goblin later in the summer.
Farm Update
We’re getting into the thick of planting season at Living Energy Farm. This year we’ll be
growing the usual assortment of vegetables and grains for seed and food, while also expanding our orchards. We’re excited that our new member, Chrissy, is taking on a lot of seed growing responsibilities. This will go a long way in allowing our community to continue to grow seeds for income in the future, since outreach projects have been growing quickly over the past few years, taking up more and more of Debbie’s time.
Chrissy has two children, Harvey and Jenny. Having another family on the farm continues to make our lives more fun and interesting. Among other things, the kids have inspired an ambitious watermelon trial this year with 15 different varieties, including some representation from deep south watermelons that Alexis grew in his youth in Georgia. We’re also doing an eggplant trial this year, but the kids are less excited about that.
This spring we welcomed our newest member, Ian, who hails from just over the border in West Virginia. Ian brings a lot of diverse skills to our team, along with a love of mountain music and humor. He attended our training last year, thinking he might want to take his homestead off the grid. Instead, he decided to join ours. Aren’t we lucky!
The Reach of Living Energy Farm
Folks often ask us for advice on how to integrate DC Microgrid technology into their lives while maintaining grid powered “backup.” We usually tell them, if you’re going to be on the grid, insulate your house and put windows on the south side for passive solar gain if you can. If you are using grid power, installing solar electricity in a grid supported house is a waste of time and resources.
People like to think of solar electricity as inherently good. Photovoltaic panels are ecologically costly, and we have become accustomed to using massive amounts of energy. Adding more energy to current consumption patterns is kind of like finding a new source of beer for an alcoholic. It doesn’t help.
There is a large and growing field of academic study that illuminates the futility of trying to meet modern energy demands from the supply side with “renewable” energy. Ozzie Zehner coined the term productivism in “Green Illusions” to describe this phenomena. A new book on the subject is More and More and More: an All-Consuming History of Energy, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The book debunks the popular idea that “energy transitions” have happened in the past and will, presumably, happen in the future. It explains that this is a myth and that, in all of modern history, new energy sources have never made the old ones obselete. They simply increase overall energy consumption.
Take firewood, for example. There is a myth that “coal saved the forests,” that the burning of fossil fuels has reduced the burning of wood for fuel. This is not true. Globally, wood consumption is higher than ever. In fact, in the UK the single largest carbon emitter is a wood-burning power plant that imports wood from the US and Canada. Shockingly, its emissions are absent from the country’s carbon accounting because it is classified as “renewable.”
Renewable energy in a growth based economy is simply that: more energy. The corporatist economy will swallow it up and continue to grow. The real work of our age is not finding new ways to feed our addiction, but learning to live well while consuming less resources. This is the work we are doing at Living Energy Farm. We have created an energy system that we call a Direct Drive DC Microgrid, or D3M for short. D3M can provide modern energy services with zero coal, nuclear, natural gas, or industrial “renewables.” With 300 watts installed PV per capita, D3M has a far lower cost and resource footprint than conventional renewable energy systems. It’s a tool that can enable low-income communities to “cut the cord” of energy addiction.
We do what we can to promote D3M, through media appearances, annual trainings, and various installation projects, some close to home and others abroad. Promoting D3M is exciting, and our project list keeps growing. But the reality is that very few D3M systems exist that haven’t been built by our team. If D3M works so well, why isn’t it spreading on its own merits? We think there are several problems standing in the way of its adaptation. A big one is the persistent fantasy that a renewable energy “transition” can stop the modern economy’s consumption of fossil fuels by adding energy sources.
Another big problem is the organization of the modern world around individuals (or couples) owning property. Both the rugged homesteader and the city dweller doesn’t have the time or resources to build, maintain, or manage a solar thermal, D3M or biogas system. These systems require village level cooperation. Not coincidentally, the focus on private property and private investment leaves us all dependent on powerful corporations who produce almost every material thing we need.
We have been attempting to overcome these impediments by taking the technology to people abroad who might appreciate it more, and who are organized in a manner to make better use of it. We have made some progress in the Caribbean. We are planning a scouting trip to Sub Saharan Africa, currently planned for October. On paper, the energy needs of African villages could be well served by D3M, and thus provide a model that could grow more quickly. We will have to see how that works out.
We also work with activist organizations in the US, and do what we can to enhance self
determination in communities left out of the “American dream.” We are often met with enthusiasm in communities of color. We sometimes get the cold shoulder from professionals who cannot enhance their careers with our technologies. We don’t fit their funding categories, and they are often the gatekeepers of nonprofit and government funds.
So we keep trying. We have a better crew than we have ever had at LEF. We are all volunteers, and some days it feels like we are trying to do too much. We continue to develop technologies to fit D3M and the needs of small farmers, including biogas, a DC washing machine, a simplified combine harvester, and other projects. We are doing what we can to spread our ideas. We are always looking for help in doing that.
Living Energy Farm is a project to build a demonstration farm, community, and education center in Louisa County that uses no fossil fuels. For more information see our website http://www.livingenergyfarm.org, or contact us at livingenergyfarm@gmail.com or Living Energy Farm, 1022 Bibb Store Rd, Louisa VA, 23093. Donations to the Living Energy Farm Institute are tax deductible. Click here to make a tax deductible donation. Make sure to designate your donation for Living Energy Institute.
Articles, Videos, and Podcasts about LEF are here: https://livingenergyfarm.org/articles-and-videos/
Syrup, Talk, Renovations, Dinner, and Canning
by Raven
Here are some Facebook posts from mid-April looking at everything happening in the communes from boiling down maple syrup to encouraging folks to can their excess harvest.
Serenity Solidarity sent a little video along of them doing a “boil down” with an important message.
These are stills from the video. You can see the original ‘reel’ here.
Unfortunately, this didn’t do very well. Although it got four loves (including one from Serenity Solidarity) and a like, it only got thirty-three views.
We also published something from Serenity Solidarity about a talk that they were hosting on a book against prisons.
It sounded like a great cause but the post got no likes or loves and only twenty-eight views.
At Twin Oaks, they are still making the transition away from making hammocks and that is freeing up space for other things.
This got six likes and a comment but only ninety-nine views.
East Wind posted about a feast they had in March.
This post did very well on Facebook, with two likes, two loves, a wow!, and over a hundred and thirty views.
Finally, Southern Exposure wanted to encourage canning as a way to deal with surplus verggies.
The whole article is here. These are the pictures they put on Facebook.
This got six likes and a love but just ninety views.
Watering, Animals, Rebuilding, and Ira
by Raven
We’re now moving into mid-April on Facebook. During this stretch we had some posts that were barely seen and some posts with good viewing numbers.
Let’s start with a post from Southern Exposure, talking about garden watering.
I’m not sure how many of our Facebook readers have gardens to water but while it got both a like and a love, only forty folks saw it.
East Wind wanted to show off their animal life. Facebook now has something called “Reels” which are very short little videos that you can post (maybe they are trying to compete with TikTok?) and East Wind used this to give little clips of various creatures.
These are various stills from the video, which can be seen here.
And, here’s a still of Pigeon, the star of the show:
While two people loved this, it’s impossible to know how many folks saw it because, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t track its ‘Reels’.
I found this next post on the Twin Oaks Queer Gathering site but it really affects all of the summer events on the conference site.
This post did very well on FB with two loves, three cares, sixteen likes, three comments, and over a hundred and eighty views.
Finally, the FIC posted an interview with the amazing Ira.
You can read the whole interview here.
This also did pretty well, with five loves (including one from the FIC), three likes, a share, and over a hundred and thirty views.
Seed Saving, Potato Trenches, Twin Oaks Twins, and Butchering
by Raven
This was from the first week in April on Facebook and while it didn’t start out so well, in terms of viewership, it ended up pretty okay.
The start was with a repost from Southern Exposure.
Here’s a link to the guide from SESE.
Unfortunately, in spite of getting a like and two loves on Facebook, it only got forty some viewers.
They were digging for potatoes at East Wind.
This did a little bit better, with five likes, one love, and a still pretty low viewership of just over seventy.
Then, I reposted a very cute picture from Twin Oaks.
This got three loves, eight likes, and just over a hundred and seventy views.
Finally, East Wind now has lots of beef.
This also did pretty well, with two loves, seven likes, and well over a hundred and seventy views.
Solar Everything
Alexis shows the Solar Cooking Museum how they live at Living Energy Farm.
Leaves, Bamboo Teepees, Hippie Acrobatics, YouTube, and Planting Season
by Raven
The last week in March was not a good week for our Facebook statistics. We reposted some good pieces, they just didn’t have that many viewers.
Twin Oaks wanted folks to know about the latest version of “The Leaves”. (And, yes, I meant “edition” rather than “addition”.)
We published the actual edition here.
This post didn’t do very well. It got just one like and only fifty folks saw it.
Southern Exposure wanted you to know that you can use that pesky bamboo to put beans around.
Here’s the whole article.
This didn’t do well at all with no likes and just over thirty views.
East Wind posted this cute bit:
This got a like, a ‘haha’, and only eighty views.
Twin Oaks also wanted folks to know about their new YouTube channel and video.
We also put the video on this blog.
This didn’t do that well either, but it was the best of the bunch with three ‘cares’, two likes, a love, and eighty-five views.
Finally, we reposted another Southern Exposure article, this one about planting.
Again, you can read the full article here.
Unfortunately, although it got two likes, it only got thirty-five views.
Roots & Resilience
Calling all BIPOC intentional community folks, farmers, land stewards
For BIPOC folks: How does your identity as “BIPOC” exist in intersection with this concept of “intentional community?”
I grieve that when we think of this term “IC”, the image that may come to mind may be majority white spaces. Yet, our diverse ancestors of the global majority have always lived in village. We’ve always lived communally, speaking our languages, upholding our roles of aunties and elders, weavers and medicine people. We were in village before those ways were systemically removed from our way of life, before we were targeted for having daily ceremony with the earth, and the colonizer cosmovision did the savagery that they did and continue to do onto our Native lands.
From our experience at (majority white) spaces like the Twin Oaks Communities Conference, the BIPOC Intentional Community Council felt into the need for a BIPOC-led Intentional Communities gathering. We are making it reality alongside leadership by our friends at Acorn Community!
May 30-June 1, 2025, we will be holding our first ever Roots & Resilience: BIPOC Farmers and Intentional Communities gathering. We will have BIPOC-led workshops on Land Access 101, Legal Structures for Shared Land Ownership, Ancestrally-Relevant Regenerative Food Growing, Farm Finances, etc.
We want to merge the world of farmers and land steward folks with intentional community. We know BIPOC farmers don’t only want to grow food for business. Our dignified relationship to land should not solely depend on productivity. We want to live in intimate, healing relationship with land and create regenerative economies that support our visions.
See below for how to register, and how you can support the work as an ally to this BIPOC-led intentional community vision!
In Community,
Paola Diaz
BIPOC ICC Managing Director
| The land is calling us |
| Acorn, our host site, is a multi-racial, Black-led community. Their economic model as an intentional community is infused with their on-site seed saving cooperative which residents can be members of. This event centers Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Aligned allies accompanied by BIPOC folks are also welcome and are encouraged to donate extra if they are able. At a time of system collapse, let’s learn, vision, and create the alternatives together. The land is calling us! |
The BIPOC ICC and Acorn are thrilled to introduce a powerful group of land stewards, farmers, organizers, and visionaries who will be leading sessions at this year’s gathering.
Whether you’re just beginning your farming journey or deep in the work of community building, there’s something here for you.
🔹 Thelonius Cook – Building Community
🔹 Lauren McCalister – Funding Your Farm
🔹 Langston Kahn – Conflict Resolution in Shared Spaces & Grounding Techniques for Busy Farmers
🔹 Rev Dele – Legal Structures for Shared Land Ownership & Living with Purpose: How to Build Intentional Communities
🔹 Nairobi Hilaire – Land Access 101: Finding and Sharing Land
🔹 Ira Wallace – Seed Saving Basics
🔹 Anthony Harris – Skill Sharing as a Community
🔹 Stephanie Miller – Building a Successful Farm: Planting Strategies for Beginners – A hands-on workshop focused on soil prep, crop rotation, and organic practices.
commune life 