The Farm: Stephen Gaskin’s Tennessee Commune That Outlasted the Sixties

The Farm is a still-inhabited intentional community near Summertown, Tennessee, founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and people who had traveled from California in a bus caravan. Its early experiment in common property, vegan food, home birth, and low-cost living did not remain intact: a 1983 financial reorganization ended the all-in-common system. What endured is a place where communal history, midwifery, ecological work, and daily rural life continue to meet.

How did The Farm begin in Tennessee?

The Farm grew out of Stephen Gaskin’s San Francisco “Monday Night Class,” a large, informal gathering that discussed spirituality, social change, and psychedelic experience. The community’s own historical timeline says the class was drawing about 1,000 people a week by 1969, before a coast-to-coast speaking journey assembled regular attendees, buses, vans, trucks, and campers into a traveling group. The Farm Community’s history timeline records 300 residents in 1971; the Tennessee Encyclopedia places the resulting settlement on roughly 1,750 acres in southeastern Lewis County.

The journey is important because the settlers were not simply looking for inexpensive real estate. They were attempting to make a spiritual and social proposition visible: cooperation, voluntary simplicity, nonviolence, vegetarianism, and what the Tennessee Encyclopedia calls “shared abundance.” At the beginning, members held possessions in common, ate in communal arrangements, and tried to build essential systems from the ground up. Tennessee History for Kids notes that the community organized a dining room, motor pool, laundromat, rudimentary phone system, water tower, and plumbing.

That origin also cautions against a nostalgic fantasy of instant self-sufficiency. The Tennessee Encyclopedia reports that the Highland Rim soil proved unproductive and that few residents had farming experience. The Farm’s name captured an aspiration more than an inherited agricultural expertise; construction, electronics, publishing, and other enterprises helped residents support the place while they learned what living there required.

What made its food experiment more than a commune diet?

The Farm’s food choices were tied to an ethic as well as a menu. Its residents avoided meat and dairy, and the community became associated with vegetarian cooking and soy foods at a time when tofu, tempeh, and soy milk were far less familiar to many American shoppers. The Tennessee Encyclopedia identifies vegetarianism and cooperation as central practices, while the Vegetarian Resource Group’s 1993 account describes gardens, a small orchard, and a vineyard alongside families’ organic plots.

The surprising part is that the Farm’s agricultural vision did not translate into a giant, successful communal farm. The same Vegetarian Resource Group account says there was no large-scale organic farming there. That distinction matters: the community’s influence came as much through making, publishing, cooking, and distributing alternatives as through crop yields. Idealism had to work around soil, skills, capital, and labor rather than erase them.

In 1974, Farm members created Plenty International as an outreach organization. According to Plenty’s history, its earliest volunteers distributed crop surpluses to nearby rural communities and later expanded food distribution to places including Nashville, Memphis, Chicago, Alabama, and Mississippi. Plenty’s origin turns the Farm’s internal idea of abundance outward—an instructive shift from lifestyle demonstration toward service.

Why is The Farm so closely linked to midwifery?

Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwifery Center made the community a consequential site in the modern U.S. home-birth movement. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Farm midwives, working under Gaskin’s direction, became a vanguard and then a center of a national movement toward home birth. The Tennessean reported in 2014 that the center’s certified professional midwives had attended more than 3,000 births since 1970.

That legacy should not be reduced to a countercultural curiosity. It was built through repeated practice, records, training, and arguments about authority in childbirth. The Farm’s natural-childbirth program emerged from a community that wanted everyday institutions to reflect its values; it then developed consequences far beyond the settlement. In 2011, the Right Livelihood Foundation honored Ina May Gaskin for her work to revive and teach woman-centered midwifery.

It also shows why “sustainable living” cannot mean energy and food alone. Care work, practical knowledge, and who gets to participate in decisions about birth are part of a community’s social infrastructure. The Farm’s midwifery history is a case study in how an alternative institution can become influential when it turns belief into durable skill.

What changed in 1983, and what survived?

By the early 1980s, the original all-in-common economy was under serious pressure. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes financial problems and a more hierarchical structure; in 1983, a “Changeover” reorganized the community. Tennessee History for Kids similarly explains that the reorganization ended the former system in which possessions and income were shared by everyone living there.

Changeover did not mean disappearance. The Farm continued as an intentional community, while households and enterprises assumed more individual responsibility. Its own account of a 1971 newspaper story calls today’s Farm a modern ecovillage and an example of sustainable living, even as it makes clear that it is no longer a commune in the old sense. The Farm Community preserves that history rather than pretending the original arrangement never had limits.

The detail worth retaining is modest and vivid: a 2024 Plenty retrospective remembers an early Farm with one nine-inch black-and-white television in the one house that had electricity, while most homes relied on kerosene lamps and wood stoves. Plenty International presents this not as a recipe to copy uncritically, but as a reminder of how austerity, ingenuity, and collective purpose were intertwined.

What can The Farm contribute to sustainability now?

The Farm’s contemporary relevance lies less in preserving 1971 unchanged than in offering a long record of revision. Plenty International, founded by the Farm community in 1974, continues to describe work in environmental stewardship and solar energy from its headquarters on the Farm. Plenty International marked its 50th anniversary in 2024, an unusually long institutional afterlife for a countercultural experiment.

Today’s arguments about intentional communities often circle familiar questions: who owns land, how is labor shared, how much privacy can coexist with mutual obligation, and can ecological values survive financial stress? The Farm cannot settle those questions. Its history does demonstrate that a community can acknowledge failure in one governing model, keep useful institutions alive, and remain a place where people test different relations to consumption, care, and land.

There is a further reason to read the Farm’s history closely. It distinguishes aspiration from procedure. A shared meal, a garden, or an appealing philosophy can create a sense of common purpose; they do not, by themselves, decide how money is accounted for, how care is distributed, how land is repaired, or how a community responds when its first plan stops working. The Farm’s story is most illuminating when readers hold both sides together: the generosity that made people build institutions for one another, and the discipline required to keep those institutions viable. That balance is also a useful antidote to the tendency to use the word “commune” as either a compliment or a joke. The past becomes more instructive when it is allowed to include capable work, genuine conviction, unresolved conflict, and change.

Why It Still Matters

The Farm outlasted the sixties not because it froze time, but because it changed. Its founding generation’s confidence in shared property and voluntary simplicity met real constraints—soil, money, skills, and governance—and the community had to reorganize. That makes its story more useful than a tale of either perfect utopia or inevitable collapse.

Its most durable contributions were practical: midwives trained and births attended, vegetarian food normalized, outreach organized, and land kept in community life. For readers interested in sustainability, The Farm asks a durable question: which ideals become sturdier when they are turned into institutions that can learn?

Related reading: Sustainable Living pillar page; Twin Oaks and the Communal Experiment in Intentional Living.