Beneath the Surface

It is an otherworldly drive down South Turkey Creek Road, where the creek guides the tight curves of the street and the trees seem greener somehow. Last summer, it was the path back in time as we journeyed to the Medlen prairie school camp. Somehow, we did the same last weekend, me and my girls, time traveling to Milky Whey Creamery. I enjoy this sort of outing on any Saturday morning, but especially now, with our present lives in an uproar, it feels like a privilege to step back into something simpler. Of course, even the sweetest things are made up of layers of questions and truths and personal discoveries.

I met Colby Accacian and Charlie Funk a couple of months ago on my first visit to the small farm on 23 acres in Morrison. Neither  are native to Colorado, but both have varied and extensive experiences in farming and intentional community, which led them to their current project.

“I started farming in New Zealand and went there without knowing anyone,” Accacian’s story began. “I would go to farmer’s markets and ask to trade labor for a place to stay and food—a work trade.”

Funk’s story originated at college in Boston, where, studying environmental analysis and policy, she began to take stock of how she was consuming. “I became incredibly obsessed with reducing my carbon footprint. My whole life revolved around that,” she said. Funk found this easy to do in a city where she would ride her bike and shop the farmer’s markets. “It was the beginning of simplifying my life in an intentional way.”

While Accacian met the Land family in New Zealand, whose lifestyle echoed the rustic approach of the Amish, Funk got an education in the costs and motivations of farming across the country, from Vermont to Hawaii to Washington State and, eventually, to Coyote Family Farm in Penngrove, California. Accacian, once back in the States, helped to establish Coyote Family Farm. “We had the initial intention of a meditation community. Sitting together and starting a farm,” he explained. “I was there for five years and helped get the farm running, which included getting the farmer’s market and the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture].”

Many values-based communities, once they become organized, once they encounter growth, must make a decision to adjust and expand or to remain steadfast and find a way to quietly survive. As Coyote Family Farm followed a growth trajectory, Accacian and Funk found their personal values and their desire to hold fast to them aligned with each others’. “I was ready for a different relationship to work and lifestyle that was more in line with the needs of the land,” Accacian recalled. “A shift away from production agriculture. Even with generous intentions to feed our local community, we were asking so much of the soil each year, pushing the limits of how much we could grow, of how much product we could extract from the soil in order to sell and generate income.”

“I didn’t like the hustle of that,” Funk added. “It was too much to ask of my personal body, to ask of other people’s bodies. I understood why the culture on that farm was the way it was, why the pressures were so high, but it was not how I wanted to live in relation to the land.”

Then, an opportunity manifested. Accacian’s parents offered a plot of land in the Rocky Mountains for the purposes of farming to live and to share. Over the past year, Accacian and Funk have transformed windows into a greenhouse bursting with tomatoes and tomatillos, overgrown fields into pasture for milking goats and a few sheep, and a flat piece of earth into a garden yielding seasonal greens, vegetables and flowers. To both farmers, the accomplishment looks a lot more like what they set out to do. They make breakfasts from eggs and plants raised on their property, drink the milk from the goats they tend—and can even pick out notes in the milk from the different goats as a wine connoisseur can uncover the flavors of different grapes. “We have a safety net,” Funk explained, nodding to their family connection and community. “It helps us to live more lightly on the earth.”

Of course, humankind is connected to each other and to the spaces in which they reside, however delicately. Though they have worked more closely to their deeply held values, Accacian and Funk have also realized how necessary is compromise. “It feels like we are constantly making compromises,” said Accacian. “For example, we said we didn’t want to buy any plastic. We’ve ended up buying drip tape because that’s a way to save water, which feels like a more important resource.” Funk told me that they drove over an hour to find alfalfa that hadn’t been contaminated with herbicide, and how she had to weigh the use of fossil fuels to get to the product against not having clean product at all. In a quest for pure living and work, there are still paradoxical obstacles—questions of greater good.