David Rauschenbach

Most intentional communities struggle with finances. Members oftentimes show up with a dream, invest large amounts of time and capital, and then find themselves struggling with their balance sheet, and needing to import a steady stream of money in order to keep everything going.

Communities with a central line of business provide an interesting advantage, in that they enable members to simply show up and go to work. Silver mine boom towns of the late 19th century offered this attractor, and so do modern communities that sell eco-tourism.

The Agropolis Farm website presents a concept for regional, community-level farming. It provides an interesting and attractive visualization of a produce market that brings food one step closer to consumers. This represents an improvement in freshness and quality, a reduction in transportation, and a way to address largely untapped market demands for food distribution systems which empower consumers to directly supervise their food production supply lines.

Simon Black recently recommended a book to his readers titled Emergency, by Neil Strauss. The recommendation was this:

“Neil tells an important story that we are all completely dependent on a functioning system of complex infrastructure.

We don't think about, for example, whether or not the lights will turn [on] when we flip the switch. We don't think about whether or not water will come out of the faucet, if the toilet will flush, if the grocery store down the road has food in stock, or if the gas station will be pumping fuel tomorrow. We take these things for granted... Emergency tells Neil's story about making this realization, ...”

I call this coming to one's senses, which happened to me at some point.

And as complex as the issue is, I think it can be reduced to a single question: “What is the ideal place to live?”. The relevance might not seem apparent on the surface, but bear with me.

I just found myself recommending the Stockman Grass Farmer again, this time to an acquaintance I met in NYC a few weeks ago who is researching small-scale closed agricultural systems. My standard line about this publication is that Allan Nation, its editor, is a collector of the world's very best agricultural R&D, which seems to be predominantly coming out of New Zealand and Argentina. If you want to grow something profitably, I could not imagine ignoring the wealth of information coming from this outlet.

My wife and I recently had the pleasure of vacationing for a week in Argentina. We decided to see what Doug Casey's La Estancia de Cafayate development had to offer, so we went along with their standard 7-day itinerary. We had a great time, and Doug's crew were friendly, smart, and fun, as one might have expected.