Joey Klein bounces around me like a boxer, hurling verbal enticements. Wiry, strong, and ruddy from long days in the sun, the Long Island native turned radical farmer invites me to “come on up the hill, come check out the chickens and goats!”
It’s a blazing humid summer in 1974, and I am a wild-haired, dirt-flecked six-year-old hippie kid, dancing and meandering in weeds and forests. The hill is Heifer Hill, a 100-acre camel’s hump of pasture and woodlands west of Brattleboro, in southern Vermont.
On a rock-gnarled incline above the main house—a converted barn housing several back-to-the-landers—the chickens and goats await in their chaotic pen. It’s a motley arrangement, producing as much entertainment as eggs and milk. Livestock is a side dish at this communal farm; the main course is a sprawling field of beans and a rotating variety of greens and other veggies.
While the Vietnam War and Watergate burn and churn toward their ignoble endings, my mother and I have settled for a few months on the southern slope, in a tent on a cow pasture. Our “front yard,” overlooking loping hills that blur into a purple distance, is a jumble of knotted grass, ancient granite fieldstones, and fresh cow pies.
As the bombs and gavels drop, I explore Heifer Hill’s undulating milkweed, purple clover, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace, its mysterious deep-thicketed woodlands erupting with huge earth-laden mushrooms and rare, magical Jack-in-the-pulpits. Mornings are spent gathering big freckled brown eggs and feeding crazy-eyed goats, and sun-blistering afternoons harvesting baskets full of beans.
Hippies, back-to-the-landers, counterculture folks, escapees from cities and war, converged on Vermont and other havens throughout the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, seeking peace and space, and digging roots deep in the rocky mineral-laden soil.
Between 1965 and 1975, roughly 100,000 “young people with counterculture ideas” ventured into the Green Mountain State to start or join communal farming endeavors like Heifer Hill, author Yvonne Daley recounts in her fascinating and copiously researched 2018 book, Going Up the Country.
Daley, herself a part of this movement, chronicles the impact these “hippies, dreamers, freaks, and radicals” had on the state’s politics. “Because of their sheer numbers, there’s no question that the hippie invaders changed Vermont into a more radical place, one recognized by the outside world as socially quirky and politically liberal,” she writes. In turn, “Vermont’s environment and economic challenges changed the newcomers as well, imprinting them with traditional values.”
On a baking hot afternoon in late June 2018, Joey greets me at the front door of his farmhouse at the end of a dirt road a mile outside Plainfield, a tiny village near the Vermont capital of Montpelier. His hair is shorter and his svelte frame even more slender than it was in 1974. A tender grin broadens as he welcomes me into his home, built in the early 1800s.
The yellow house and its huge accompanying barn reside on Littlewood Farm, where Joey and his wife, Betsy Ziegler (they married at Heifer Hill in 1980), have produced “small fruits and vegetables,” as a sign near the entrance modestly boasts, since 1987.
Betsy welcomes me to a hefty, round, wooden kitchen table. Nearly everything in the house is made of old wood. Cabinets abound with mason jars of whole grains, beans, teas, and spices. “It wasn’t until about ten years ago that we could say, ‘Everything in this meal, we grew it,’ ” Betsy says.
Over the past thirty years, the couple has managed to put their two kids through college by organically farming what Joey calls his “ideal size” of three to four acres. “Wow, that’s small,” I blurt out, to which Joey retorts, “Go to hell, that’s a lot of work.” Outside, tidy but prolific rows of deep-green veggies attest to years of dedicated toil: chard, kale, peppers, mixed salad greens, zucchini, potatoes, and greenhouse tomatoes, among other crops.
Now in his early seventies and battling Parkinson’s, Joey is passing the agrarian torch on to younger folks—a hearty athletic couple in their twenties who share Joey’s passion for small-scale organic farming and a move back to the land and soil.
Joey studied in Mexico in 1965 and Norway in 1966, before returning to the United States and moving to southern Vermont’s brewing cauldron of alternative culture and politics. He arrived on the scene in the late autumn of 1967. Ponytailed, small in stature yet hugely ebullient in spirit, he spent the mid-1960s exploring his budding passion for farming.
“I was traveling with a Quaker college called Friends World College, and I found myself drawn to rural people,” Joey recalls. “Trying to really figure out how to do organic farming became a passion, and it tied right into the counterculture.”
Christopher D. Cook
Joey Klein shows Kagen Dewey and Elise Magnant around Littlewood Farm.
He enrolled in Marlboro College in January 1968, studying soil biology and chemistry. “I really got into the hard science of it, but I was too stoned, and too distracted by the politics of the day to go to grad school.” Instead, Joey moved into “the alternative culture flourishing around Brattleboro”—a haven for communes and health-food stores, community health clinics and macrobiotic restaurants. After graduating in 1970, he moved into market gardening and small-scale farming.
In 1970, America was coming apart: bombs raining down on Vietnam (and, secretly, Cambodia and Laos), fiery riots over racism and war, students gunned down on college campuses. For Joey and many others, going “back to the land” wasn’t an escape but a search for rebuilding.
When I ask Joey if farming was a response to the times, he replies unhesitatingly, “Oh God, yes. It was an opportunity to really do something positive. There was a lot of protest, and a lot of protest that needed to be done, no doubt about it . . . but it was nice to get the opportunity to feel like you were building something.”
He later adds in an email, “There was a sense that it was the moment to seize the times, to get going on the big project of saving the world from the poisonous systems of chemical agriculture and the economy that drove it.”
As the U.S. military rained down torrents of Agent Orange to defoliate Vietnamese jungles—using chemicals that Monsanto and others would soon deploy in commercial pesticides on America’s farms and food—Joey and others sought to create a nourishing alternative. “That was basically the call, to come back and protect the soil, protect the environment, and protect human health, by growing food in a manner that didn’t require poisons.”
Joey believed the science behind organic farming was solid but “we just needed to make the cultural shift toward a new set of priorities. We needed to reinvent the food system, which would revive rural life through the establishment of numerous small farms, processors, wholesalers, and retail stores. Some of these would be run by communal groups, some by families, some by cooperatives, some by private businesses.”
Sometimes, the relationship between the toxins of war and the replenishing powers of farming was direct. Many veterans found refuge in the communal agrarian movement, Joey recalls. “One of the features of the communities I hung out with both in Vermont and New Mexico was the returning Vietnam vets, who were in horrible mental states, and sometimes suffering from Agent Orange effects. The communes were a place where they could get some soil and space.”
Whether it was veterans shattered by war or political dissidents seeking succor and refuge, Joey recalls, “political reality followed you right out to the countryside.” Some Vermont communes protected, supported, and fed members of the Weather Underground and other activists involved in anti-nuke politics and the women’s movement. As Joey puts it, “we felt pretty darn connected.”
In 1977, Joey was among the 1,400 protesters arrested in a nonviolent mass occupation by the Clamshell Alliance at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant construction site in New Hampshire. “We refused to leave the property,” recalls Joey, who “spent a couple weeks in the Concord Armory.”
After the protests, Joey returned to the fields and soil. “Part of what made sense to me is that if we were going to have people in these political units, we had to have the ability to feed these political units, that we should be self-sufficient in our food production,” he explains. “I really felt that part of being politically independent was to be able to feed ourselves. There were a lot of reasons to grow your own food, but that was real commonplace in the back-to-the-land ethos.”
“Radical politics was an ongoing effort without a lot of sense of accomplishment in the early 1970s,” Joey says. “It certainly needed to be done, and I participated in both anti-war and anti-nuke protests regularly. The farming offered a positive channel to try to build a new system.”
At Heifer Hill and other Vermont communes we briefly called home—including famed radical settlements such as Total Loss Farm and Red Clover—I recall a searching intensity, an energetic swirl of exploration, experimentation, and examination.
‘There was a sense that it was the moment to seize the times, to get going on the big project of saving the world from the poisonous systems of chemical agriculture and the economy that drove it.’
There was plenty of chaos and failure—and rampant sexism and white privilege, not remotely a model for anything. But the hippies and back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s did more than dance naked and trip on acid at Woodstock. They built farms, affordable health-food restaurants featuring local produce, women’s health clinics, alternative journalism ventures such as the Liberation News Service, worker-run co-ops, and child care centers.
Vermont became a hotbed of radical intellectual and political settlement. It’s where Bernie Sanders found his political home, joining the state’s fledgling Liberty Union Party in the early 1970s, then rising to become mayor of Burlington, a member of Congress and the U.S. Senate, and a top-ranked presidential candidate. Major writers such as Murray Bookchin, poet Verandah Porche, historian Marty Jezer, journalist Andrew Kopkind, and others were all part of this rich cultural-political stew.
In 1987, after scuffling to grow food on a “bony” rock-laden hill farm in Williamstown, Vermont, Joey and Betsy settled at Littlewood Farm with their two children, then aged six and one. For decades, they mostly sold their eruptions of produce to local Vermont food co-ops in Plainfield and Montpelier but also to big supermarkets like Whole Foods.
As organic farming gained a foothold throughout Vermont in the 1970s, Joey “embraced the idea of Vermont farmers connected to one another and to the greater economy,” becoming a volunteer advocate for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. He is quoted in Daley’s book as calling the group’s vision of organic farming “something political and even revolutionary . . . the absolute foundational root of the foodie thing now.”
Beyond making a living, Joey’s passion was feeding local communities. “Put the food into the neighborhood, you know, feed the artists and the educators, the civil rights attorneys,” he says.
“And the granite workers,” Betsy reminds him. It’s an important point: prices for organics, and a persistent perception of health-food elitism, drive an unhealthy wedge between organic haves and have-nots. Mindful of this gap, Joey and Betsy have sought to bridge healthy food’s class divide through a mix of donations to area food banks and welcoming school visits to their farm.
For twenty-five years, pick-your-own strawberries drew diverse eaters from across class divides. Sometimes this included people on welfare: Friends who worked in social welfare brought young parents and parents-to-be to pick strawberries and get connected with food and the land.
Farm visits from kids, preschools, and family centers built another bridge. “The preschool field trips were the highlight of the farming year,” Joey recalls. “And of their year,” adds Betsy, a veteran schoolteacher. Joey chimes back in: “It was a big event for them, and for us. It wasn’t just middle- and upper-class hippies, it was working-class people.”
Working the land and providing food “proved to be an effective outreach tool to make connections with our neighbors,” Joey says. “Some hated us, but many were curious and interested in our ideas. The tradition of mutual aid among farmers was quite strong, and we both helped out and benefited from this.”
Now Joey is handing off his gardening spade and tractor to young farmers Kagen Dewey and Elise Magnant, who are soaking up his decades of knowledge. They are sun-bronzed, upbeat, and hard-working. Joey, walking with cane in hand, jeans and plaid shirt draping his slight frame, makes sweeping and slicing gestures as he advises Kagen on “hilling” potatoes—surrounding potato vines with slopes of fresh soil as they rise up.
“There is absolutely a sense of torch passing in farm transition,” Kagen wrote to me after my visit. “I think that all trades and practices benefit from some degree of mentorship. It seems particular to farming though that the work of the practice, the farmland, outlives every farmer and so every farmer leaves his life’s work unfinished. Nobody in the world knows Littlewood Farm like Joey does.”
Acre by acre, bite by bite, that system is changing. Alternatives to corporate industrial food, such as small-scale organic local foods and co-ops and young new farmers, continue to rise like sprouts pushing through America’s over-tilled, relentlessly monetized soils. As of 2017, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont boasts 719 USDA-organic-certified producers, covering 159,496 acres of organic farmland in Vermont.
Today’s organic revival may not look or feel like that of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The average age of America’s dwindling farm population (now at just two million farms) is worryingly high, at nearly fifty-eight years old—not an encouraging recipe for agricultural rejuvenation.
But there are social justice efforts rooted in land and agriculture sprouting up around the country, many led by people of color. This includes Familias Unidas Por la Justicia, a migrant farmworker union in Washington State and their farm cooperative run by worker-owners, Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad. In Minnesota, a project of indigenous environmental activist Winona LaDuke and the Anishinaabe Agricultural Institute is one of many working to “grow a local economy” and restore native sovereignty through hemp farming. And the urban farming movement is flourishing—look at Detroit, where farms have mushroomed from just eighty in 2000 to 1,400 today.
About Vermont, says Joey, “There seems to be a solid group of radical environmental activists around here, and people have stepped up their efforts in response to the Trump Administration’s blunderings. There are even some young folks starting new farming operations. I see no shortage of good-intentioned efforts.”
Prices for organics, and a persistent perception of health-food elitism, drive an unhealthy wedge between organic haves and have-nots.
At Littlewood Farm, and many other small organic farms throughout Vermont and beyond, the first meaning of “radical”—getting to the root—persists. It may not be a revolution, but the long rows of deep-green veggies are flourishing.
Joey and his communal agrarian comrades mark one stage in a long evolution of back-to-the-land efforts. Their lessons and goals can’t be easily transposed to the current moment, but they remind us what healthy soil has to offer—not just to the body but to the soul. Joey and so many others dedicated their lives to planting new possibilities we are benefiting from today. It’s that intensely loving vitality and deep-rooted commitment to doing things together, in communitarian fashion, that our frightful and fractured present could stand to absorb and adopt.