Visit To The CANADIAN Hog Farm

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When I comment on it, Rick's wife, Suzanne snorts, "Ha, you should have been here last week. We had soybean ice cream." Knowing them, I believe it.

Later, sitting around the potbellied stove, we notice a certain coolness on the part of some people toward us. It seems our original impression of general cooperation on the article, as relayed to us by one commune member on a visit to Toronto, was a trifle visionary.

Mark, one of the long-term residents, draws me aside: "Listen man, I don't want this thing to go down. We came up here to get away from the machine. The Establishment and magazines are part of it. We don't want the city life and its technology up here. Do you understand?"

I can in a way, but as David Zimmerman, our photographer, put it later: "Sure, they're getting away from it all. With a pickup truck in the driveway to go to town for supplies. Sure.

"They've got to realize that they always will be part of the 'machine', and that they will always be involving themselves with technology. Even fire is a technological development."

In the end, after much discussion among themselves, it is decided that those who wish to cooperate with us will do so on an individual basis.

One who does is Rick. He is the actual owner of the place, having purchased it with a small inheritance he received.

This doesn't mean he runs the Hog Farm; far from it. He is just one more member, and doesn't mind that at all.

He puts it this way: "We share everything equally as much as possible. I feel the others are contributing just as much as 1 am by making up the pool of helpers without which we couldn't survive."

"They've got to realize that they always will be part of the 'machine' "

The same spirit prevails in the purchase of such supplies as they need from the outside world. Those who have, contribute what they can. Their money has come from the sale of handicrafts, gifts and in some cases, I suspect, parental help.

The goal is self-sufficiency in two years. They grew vegetables and a soybean crop last year and raised chickens. This year they hope to get a cow and plant corn and wheat.

David Harvey, who lives nearby, shares the Hog Farm's feelings of "got to get away", but looks at it from a slightly different angle. He is 38, holds a PhD in English literature and until a year ago was a professor at New York State University in Albany. Now, with his wife, Josh, and two-year-old daughter, Karridwen, plus another couple from the States, Alex and Mary McDade, he works a lonely 100-acre farm south of Barry's Bay.

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