Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 14 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
And then once we had the classes figured out and the facilities we'd need for teaching them, we sat down and added up the housing that would be required for our students and teachers.
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PLOWBOY: This all sounds expensive.
EMERY: It is! The slaughterhouse alone will cost sixty thousand dollars before it meets all the government requirements. Our idea is a very simple one but it's going to cost a lot of money to make it work.
PLOWBOY: And where will that money come from?
EMERY: Well so far a lot of it's coming from us and our book. We've spent some of the income we've received from the Recipe Book on 115 acres for our family. But most of what we've cleared—$25,000—has gone as a down payment on a tract of more than 400 acres . . . which is ideal for the School.
That's just the seed money, of course. We've estimated that the materials alone for the School—not counting land and labor—will run at least $150,000.
PLOWBOY: Can you come up with that much?
EMERY: Well for a while it looked like we wouldn't have to. We had a couple from Denver—both just lovely people—for instance, who were going to loan us $5,000 and come and live here and help build the School for $10.00 a week. But then they came up and a nearby farm lady told them so venomously that the people of Kendrick didn't want strangers in town that the couple said they just didn't have the courage to face such a situation and so they backed out and went back to Colorado. And some of our other people have quit under fire or have been pressured into withdrawing offers of money for the School. That's just really knocked the socks off us financially.
PLOWBOY: Hold on now. Are you saying that farm people near your proposed School site are against allowing you to teach environmentally sound farming practices?
EMERY: No, I don't think it's really like that. I believe that the people living up there in Idaho's Nez Perce County are actually pretty decent and upright folks. I must, or I wouldn't be there. What has happened, though, is that there have been some terrible rumors and misunderstandings spread about the School.
For instance, we think we'll have to build facilities to handle a maximum of approximately 200 students because it seems reasonable to suppose that most people are going to want to come to the School of Country Living during the summer when they're on vacation and when the weather is best and when they can work in the gardens and so on. So we anticipate that—maybe one day in five years when the schedules get fouled up and overlap as badly as they possibly can—we'll have to be able to handle 200 people. And that means we'll have to have 50 cabins to put them in and a kitchen big enough to feed that many students and so on. But most of the time there'll be far less outsiders at the school than that. Some days there may not be any. We'll have to take what comes, you know.
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