New Vrindaban

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"Money that you'll receive as income from your incense business."

"Right. The incense is bringing us sufficient money to maintain the people and cows here now and to expand New Vrindaban into an actual two-mile-square village, certainly within the next five years."

"You must have a good idea, then, of what the land will cost."

"The first farm, which you're on, has 114 acres of undeveloped pasture and woodland—primarily woodland—and, originally, an old farmhouse and barn. It cost us $4,000. This is a little over $35 an acre, with the old farmhouse and barn thrown in free. Of course the property was cheaper because most vehicles couldn't make it up the road. The second farm we purchased, Madhuban, contains 90 acres and a two-story house. Because it's on the main road and has developed pastures and good pine forests, we paid $7,000 for it, which is a little over $77 an acre. The third farm, Bahulaban, contains 151 acres. It's price was $20,000 , which is $132.00 an acre . . . but it has a large and sturdy house worth $7,000, and a big barn and silo, two concrete garages and a concrete milkhouse. Bahulaban, in short, is a fully developed farm.

"Two of these properties are adjacent, and there're two farms between us and the third property. We hope to acquire these two farms within the next three to five years, but the local people now understand what we're doing and are asking more money. Ordinarily the top price for land around here is $50 an acre. Anything you pay over that should be understood to be for whatever buildings are on the property."

"Do you feel that a home business like incense is consistent with your goals of self-sufficiency?"

"At the present we believe that self-sufficiency outside the International Society's subsidy or a communal business is impossible. Too many objects have to be bought outside the farm, and money's needed to support the animals, to acquire and maintain vehicles, to get some very basic foodstuffs, medicines, clothes, building materials, tools, electricity and billions of other items that a living entity is somehow forced to buy during his brief life."

"So you're saying that self-sufficiency isn't possible?"

"We do ascribe to the underlying WALDEN idea of self-sufficiency and minimization for the basic `I-am-not-this-body' philosophy of Krishna consciousness aims toward this. Simplify. Simplify. At the same time we have to run a community. Thoreau didn't have to contend with sixty people, or a hundred, or—in the future—maybe a village of several hundred. He was simply setting down the ideal as it applied to the individual, and no doubt on an individual basis it can still be realized. In fact, it can be realized more rapidly on an individual basis, for on a communal basis the type of self-sufficiency that you find in WALDEN takes a good deal of time.

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