and he was intent on helping us develop our practical worldly skills, especially as they related to the craft of farming and gardening at Zen Center. Whenever you do something, anything at all, Harry used to say with an old drum tobacco cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, make sure you ask yourself these questions. What do you want? How much does it cost? And are you willing to pay the price? Once you can answer these questions, get to work. What do you want? How much does it cost? And am I willing to pay the price? So it was wonderful to work with him. Every Sunday afternoon, we had a session where he'd come down to the garden. We'd go in through the gate, and he'd stomp along in his crutches, and we'd go sit in the herbal circle, and he would just reminisce. He would study. Study, you know, somebody would bring him a plant and ask him, how did this get like that? And he would just associate and tell us. We had these wonderful studies. We would sometimes go,

[01:03]

he had a truck called Buttercup. It was a yellow Ford truck, rumbly old beast, and we'd go up on the headlands in the truck because he couldn't walk. And all along the way, he'd have us sitting in the back of the truck and calling out all the names of the native plants. This was our training. Can you believe it? This was Zen students were trained with this kook. And the abbot of Zen Center thought, this guy is a great, you know, he's a great teacher, and we should train with him. We trained not only with her, we also trained with a refined renegade tea master, Nakamura Sensei, Mrs. Nakamura, who, you know, was incredible. She was discovered by Gary Snyder because she was living in the attic of the house that he rented in Japan. What? Who was this old lady up there practicing tea? She'd left her husband after she raised her children. She left her husband, that's that, I've had enough of this. He was a banker, very prominent banker in Japan. She left him to study tea. She was up there in the attic, very aristocratic woman. Gary Snyder said, what's going on here? Took her under

[02:05]

his wing, introduced her to the Zen beatniks who were interested in Zen, and she somehow connected with the Baker family and came here and lived in their house, which is the ranch house. Lived in the back part of that house, and practiced tea and taught tea. There was quite a collection of people, and we were expected, those of us who were serious about Zen, were expected to work with her and expected to work with Nakamura Sensei. We worked with some weirdos, you know, with some long shots. They're great teachers. So, anyway, he was terrific, and we met every Sunday and studied with him, and he taught us a lot about how to see a land. He talked about having a vision that would last for 500 years. When you look at a piece of land, imagine not how it's going to be in your lifetime, but how it might be over 500 years, how you take care of it.

[03:06]

So he thought long thoughts. He dreamed long thoughts, and he often talked about being green-gulched. Don't be green-gulched, he'd say. Don't be caught up in the present moment only, you know, and live and think for the long haul. Live and think in a broad, bold way. And he taught us a lot, a lot of physical skills. He was really good. He died of pneumonia, I don't know, probably from smoking too much or some, I don't know, he was sick for quite a while. He died, pretty resolute, you know, resolved life in 1981 in March. He died down at Yvonne's house, he eventually had to leave Green Gulch and he moved down to Yvonne's. He was responsible for helping to set up Arbor Day. He and George Wheelwright did the addresses for Arbor Day for many years. They talked a lot about the planting. I miss it. I mean, I never worked on an Arbor Day without planting with George and Harry and Alan. Alan, no, George and Harry. So there was a tradition of taking care of the place that was passed on

[04:11]

to those of us who happened to be in that place. Always an understanding that people who studied farming would be studying Zen. You wouldn't do either or. But at the same time we developed, because of our connection in the wider community, we developed a very lively place in the non-profit sector. I mean, think of, if I say to you two to five percent of the farmers, two to five percent of the population of Zen Center is interested in farming, really interested in farming and organic, you know, horticulture and agriculture, then about one percent of that population, or maybe one to five percent of that population of people interested in farming, this is on the national level, are doing it in the non-profit sector. And you're going to meet a lot of them this summer. You're going to meet people that are doing non-profit farming. Because what distinguishes us is we're involved in teaching, in outreach, in growing food, not only for

[05:15]

financial, you know, profit, but also to teach the craft of growing food. And we are, most important of all, we are endowed and supported and, you know, supered by the wider community that want us to do this kind of thing. And it's our job. So to use that status well is also part of our Zen training. Because we're farming in a Zen Center, we're expected to also teach farming and to demonstrate ecological farming and to offer it to the wider community, to give back. And that's part of our practice. It's part of the covenant of being able to be in this place. Am I haranguing you? Okay. It's a radical dream, don't you think? It's a radical dream. From the very beginning we've had a sense of service, and this is really for Rachel in the development office, I promised her, poor thing, she's had to listen for two hours. But from the

[06:21]

very beginning I worked, I remember when I was first here in 1975, working with the California Corps, California Handicapped, California Corps for the Handicapped, working with handicapped children. They'd come down the road with their crutches and canes and walkers and wheelchairs. They weren't all, they were mentally and physically handicapped. There were some very out there kids. I remember they were looking at me and they would look at me like, who are you? They'd look at me like, and I was supposed to work with them. I wondered, how are we going to do this? They were hardly standing up. They were teetering around 1975. They came every week. I looked forward all week to working with these kids, and they would fall on the beds and on the plants and pull out a few weeds, and they loved it, and they'd eat the earth, and we'd have to pull them out of the earth. Stop eating the earth. We want you to cultivate the earth, don't feed it. I remember introducing them to Sea Dog, our dog, and I'm saying, she's a watchdog, and one little kid said, where's her clock?

[07:23]

What's that? I'll never forget that. She's looking at her legs. I don't see her clock. It was wild. It's wild working with those kids. We worked with inner city kids. I remember Baker Oshie bringing kids from the Page Street neighborhood and saying, we're open. We're open to you. We want you to see where we live. Show them around. Treat them really well. These are kids from the Page Street neighborhood. When we weren't looking, they went in the rooms and cleaned us out. Wallets had been scoured after that tour, so we got a little savvy. We thought, that's not helping the kids, leaving our stuff around like that. We trained Catherine Snead from the San Francisco Jail Project. She said, can I come here and receive training? We said, you bet. She lived in the lower barn, unheard of. She came and talked to, the lower barn is down where you guys were. There were offices down there. It was funky. She lived in the farm office, which used to be in the lower barn,

[08:23]

right about where the library is now, where you're living. She lived in a little office. Grew up in the Page Street neighborhood. She knew ghetto life inside out. Nobody was pulling any wool over her eyes. She wanted to learn farming so she could work at the jail. Well, we gave her a place. That was very unusual because everybody had to be interested in Santa. They couldn't come here. Kathy was showing us what the real world was. From the very first, we've had a quite strong relationship with her, which is deep into true friendship. We've been through a lot together. She and I worked together for six months, and then she went on to UCSC, where she got some really good training. We also did a lot of work with school groups. We helped set up gardens at Laguna Honda Hospital, a garden for the handicapped. We did a number of AIDS gardens. We worked with Esan setting up a garden at Hartford Street, those of us going over on our day off to help cultivate that garden and get it in good shape because that was Zen in action.

[09:29]

That was what you do, of course, because we know how to. We've been blessed with the opportunity to sit still, to listen to the wind, to learn from this land, and then people are asking us to show them. We're not going to do that. Of course we're going to do it. We've set up a number of projects involved with the urban school, with McAteer High School, with a number of other alternative and mainstream high schools, working with high school students, teaching them organic horticulture so that they can go out and develop it. We've been, for years, working on the front lines, doing gleaning, offering our fields as one of the many pastures for gleaning. That's what Janet Brown, our great friend from the All-Star Organics Farm, is doing now, bringing groups of wealthy kids to glean for children who aren't as fortunate. That means they go through and we've picked over our chard and there's still some chard leaves. The wealthy kids, we call them the beamer gleaners because they come in beamers, the beamer gleaners. So they come and they park their beamers and work with us all day. And they harvest a thousand pounds of chard for soup

[10:33]

kitchens. And their lives begin to open up in a different way. Yeah, they're still, they're happening all around you. They're primary. So I want you to know this because it's really important. You know, we've always had a sense, if we're going to grow for Green's Restaurant and we used to provide for Chez Panisse Restaurant, then we're also going to be delivering to Martin DePere Soup Kitchen. We're going to be delivering to the Mission. We're going to be delivering to the Marin County Food Bank. We're going to be working in the jail. We're going to be getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of plants away to the jail. Without a doubt. Yeah, we provide a lot of plants and a lot of expertise for setting up school gardens. You know, the Martin Luther King Jr. High School Garden, Peter and I are both on the advisory board, helping with that garden, helping with those projects, helping, you know, just sharing what we know. Welcome. Hi. You can have a chair. I think I will. Does Curtis still get delivered to soup kitchens?

[11:36]

Yeah. On a regular basis? I think so. We haven't paid for a soup kitchen since we gleaned probably six weeks ago. Just because we gleaned, I mean, everything's gone. Okay. Yeah. But you know, it's hard to keep, it's hard to keep your hand and heart going with farming and also to maintain a schedule on the life, you know, and it takes, in order to have a place run really well, you do have to have people who are dedicated to the craft of farming as their practice. Here comes one of them. Sorry, honey. You didn't make it though. You didn't make it. At least I had a good game. You didn't make it to the game? No, no. Oh, you didn't make it to that dedication? No, it didn't work to try not to practice. Yeah, that's true. It's been really hard. So I can tell you, it's been hard and it's also been rich. So Peter, maybe you'll tell a

[12:38]

little bit about, you know, we've talked a whole lot about Alan and Harry. I need to tell them more about Alan. I haven't told them so much about practicing with Alan, but I promised everybody that you'd talk a little bit about the original vision of the farm and what it was like working with the horses and with the animals and maybe some of the stuff about the Dalai Lama's comments and what it's been like to practice, to have your primary practice be farming and not formal Zen. And, you know, just anything you want to convey to this wonderful group of brand new students. And this, you know, so let's introduce ourselves. This is Peter Rudnick, who's been here since 1975 and worked on the farm, worked in the fields in the farm for close to 20 years, up until about a year ago, when after, you know, long, much too long, series of meetings, it was decided that it's best now to rotate and have some, you know, changeover. So Peter's now working, doing other

[13:41]

stuff in the county, helping set up, he was working with Catherine Sneed at the jail and two days a week, working with prisoners and on the front lines in the city and also helping set up a project, a great project at one of the oldest Catholic, the oldest high school in California, San Domenico, K through 12th grade Catholic school in San Anselmo. He's helping set up a farming and gardening project, which includes a whole composting system and working, he's an elected member of the Muir Beach Community Services District. He got the most votes, I'm happy to say, and he's considered a moderate, which is very cool, on that in the outside world, which is nice, not so moderate at Cent Center. Also a member of the Marin County Food Policy Commission, the treasurer of that group, looking at organic, how organics, I don't know what the Food Policy Commission is, but something, they do some good work. And, you know, a very experienced farmer's

[14:49]

done a lot of work, particularly with potatoes and compost, you know, studied compost really deeply. So, welcome, really happy you came. So what was the question? Oh, you were going to introduce me. Yeah. Introduce everybody. I'll let everybody say a tiny bit, you know, their name and where you've come from would be great. My name is Ann and I'm a volunteer, I'm not an apprentice this summer, and I live in the city. I see. She's particularly interested in the farm, so she's been coming out to volunteer in the farm. I think that may be I've seen you around. You have been around Yeah, the last couple weeks. Yeah. I'm a sun child. Where I've come from, I was just spending the weekend at home outside Willits, walking above the Douglas fir and redwood stumps left in ashes and feeling the spirit of those trees and

[15:51]

the huckleberries that still grow underneath them are, they're now taller than the trees. Sun Childs lived in that watershed, was born there. Where did you come from? I'm from Davis. You worked on the farm out there? Yeah. I guess Jeff and Allison also did. I'm Todd, I'm an apprentice here on the farm. Where are you from? I was raised in Illinois, Rochester, Illinois. I'm Matthew, I've been in Boulder, Colorado for the past few years. My name's Rachel, I've been in Brooklyn for the past few years. I think you know my name, but I want to remind you. Well, what's your story?

[16:54]

My story, I want to remind you. Well, my name's Mimi, but my teacher, David, if you ever talk to me about organic gardening and farming, this is your student, David Petrie. We love David Petrie. Yeah, so that's how I heard about green culture, seven years ago when I started organic farming. In Texas? In Texas, yeah. After he came from UC Santa Cruz, he came here, and you two taught him what it is. He's a great, experienced person. Oh, thanks. Laura, I'm here. I grew up in New Hampshire. Hello, Laura. I know that. Are you from St. Louis?

[18:02]

Yeah, great. So, what was the question? Well, the opportunity, you know, we have half an hour, sort of just let people know a little bit about the old history of the place, you know. I told them that we used to have cows and chickens and horses, but I haven't told them about, you know, that much about how the land was actually worked, and I did talk to them a good bit about how physically based we used to be in the first years of Zen Center, how much physical work we actually did, but talked a little bit about communal work, but it's all concrete. They don't know anything about Charlie and Matt or any of the importance. Well, we've been here since 72, right? I was lucky enough to come to Zen Center in 72, just when Zen Center was getting Green Gulch, and it's really true, and I've been thinking of it lately. There was a few guys, maybe don't work around at the time, but there was a back to the

[19:10]

land movement that maybe some child's parents were involved in that I really identified with. So when I, and I was interested in Zen, at least the idea of Zen, but meditation is not what kept me here, but seeing Green Gulch for the first time in 1972 was, you know, it was like home. It was just starting, and the barn there, the upper, all those rooms were, it was a hayloft, it was a loft. It was just like storage, and for, well, Wendy and I met Wendy at Tassajara, and we came back. We went in 73. So I'll just give you the advice. I came here, and I lived in the city, and I was volunteering for about a year, and I was asked at that point if I wanted

[20:11]

to move to Green Gulch, but I think I made a very good decision, and it's one, the one piece of advice that I tell everybody who's interested in the farm and more than just doing a season, you know, but if you're really interested in the farm, the best thing to do is get familiar with it and then go to Tassajara for a couple years, and I think that's a good piece of advice. And that way you get a sea of olives in center, and you get some credibility, and you know, there's a lot of trips always in your practice, right? But in the beginning, you have, you know, things you have to sort out. So I think the identity of the farm, it should be set up that it isn't always relying on first-year people. First-year apprentices should be within a system that's working, and I think that's what I was trying to do to get a working farm here.

[21:17]

So when Wendy and I came back in 75, they had done some work on housing, but they didn't have the nice palatial rooms that are over there now. In fact, what I remember is the assistant director shared a room with somebody that was, you know, eight by ten. I mean, it was, housing was, we got $25 a month, we were paid $25 a month, and which is more than you get. That was after two years. That was after two years, and Wendy and I were able to live on it, and then as things happened, some people were getting more money, and anyway, things worked out. The standard of living, I guess you'd say, increased. But that, you know, the housing was the main thing. There were people always living here in a temporary fashion. You know, a lot of the buildings are bullpens or horse sheds

[22:22]

that you wouldn't recognize now. The ranch house where we lived was a storage, seed storage, grain storage, and then they added on about five times. Part of what they added on was a tea house from Kyoto. Some of the nice Japanese details, so it's a mixed bag. I told the gang a lot about Baker O'Shea and about practicing with him and his vision. So you talked about George? Talked about George at length. They know about George and Harry, but they don't know, I didn't say much about the animals and about the original mission of the farm. I left that really for you, what it was like to do that, to work with horses. Yeah, well, yeah, just a little more general thing, and then we can get into that. There was a lot of building going on, and this building was built in 75. There was really an identity of people really learning a trade. You know, I was asked by the director when I came here if I

[23:30]

wanted to be a carpenter or a farmer, and since I don't like straight lines, I don't believe in parallel lines since there's nothing parallel in nature, I became a farmer. Yeah, I think it was back to the land movement, we were very idealistic, and culturally, we would do things like sow seeds for the lettuce out in the ground and then thin them, which I guess you've all transplanted, right? Yeah. Have you all transplanted? I mean, we went from there, incredible amount of labor, and we had communal work every day, sometimes up to two hours, and we had livestock. The horses came in 75,

[24:38]

because we had a couple draft horses. We were, you know, against tractors and all that kind of thing, but we had an old power wagon like the Dodge here, and basically used it as a tractor. It was like, not the green one, no, it's the white power wagon, we had one just like that, and... It was a gift from Stuart Grant. One day, I was here on a Sunday in 1972, and he drove the international truck, it was an international, and the Airstream trailer, as a gift of some sort. Part of where Stuart lives. If you go up the bridge on the way to the Red Sells. Well, I mean, we really had the identity of this being a farm, and a working farm then, and I think some of our early failures of just, I mean, it takes time from a bunch of city kids

[25:43]

with ideas. There was one, a couple people, Steve Stuckey, who's a landscape architect, priest, Brown Road kind of guy, right? He had, his father was a farmer, and so he had... And John Coonan. John Coonan was, anyway, another guy who makes very nice woodwork makes rocking chairs, things like that. And they started the farm when, in 72, things had been worked out by 75, but in 72, there was the Chadwick project over here, and he picked like the worst ground at all, right? He told me about that up here in Spring Valley, and then there was the Field Project, and I got involved in that, the Field Project, which we started an experimental plot in 72, which is in front of the field shed,

[26:49]

Field 2, and it didn't go all the way up. That second field, we graded it at one point. Well, we made a ledge there. If you've walked up there, we used to farm all the way up to the reservoir, and it kind of made a turn, but it was a gradual rise up until the hill by the reservoir. We had berries up there, and we had various crops up there in the second field. That was, and we did, we deer fenced, something I did a lot of coming on, but we deer fenced the whole 15 acres, and I think we finally got a good system then, the deer fencing, but, you know, we did pretty well from the first, but the back of the second field there, that's now the leach field above the windbreak that we planted, is where the deer always got in, and we got the Park Service a couple years ago to drop the fence because the bike trails coming through, and so I think that

[27:56]

helps on the deer. Do we grow more of our, oh, well, yeah, we grew food. There was, it was more of the norm to say if the farm grew anything that the kitchen would use it, and that's a good idea, but when we kept bringing all the zucchini to the kitchen and the rutabaga, well, it wasn't a great quantity of rutabagas, but the french fried rutabagas are very good, but zucchini in the kitchen would have to use, and sometimes they're pretty big, and in communal work, I remember, to this day, I don't eat zucchini, but we have communal work, let's see, communal work, huh? I told him that. You told him about zucchini bread and communal work? We've been imprinted here by that stuff that we did. Yeah, we, what did we have, two periods of salsa and then communal work and then breakfast, right? It's sort of like it is now sometimes, yeah.

[29:01]

So farming-wise, we wanted to get, we did a lot by hand, and the whole community helped. It wasn't so departmentalized as it is now, and we knew we wanted to try horses. Horses was an interesting endeavor. We could have picked better trained horses since we were kind of green, and they had done some pulling. It was Snip and Jerry. We have pictures, I guess you did. I don't know anymore. They're grade percherons. Anybody know horses? Grade percherons, which means they weren't thoroughbreds, but we have one horse that weighed a ton, which is pretty big, and so there was various teamsters who worked the horses, and I did it like this in 77, I guess. It was like the second

[30:08]

or third wave, and that was an interesting experience because when you're dealing with animals, you have a whole, they have a whole rhythm, right, that you need to take care of. You can't say, well, it's time for zazen, you know. I mean, the horse would have to come first, so we had Snip and Jerry, and we had Maude who came on. I learned how to jump off a plow the right way. It's the right way and the wrong way. We had some pretty hairy experiences with the horses, but we were getting it down, I think, and I think it was at that point, I mean, Zen Center's gone through so many changes, and I think basically there was more of a vision of Green Gulch not just being a practice place, but a place, a meeting place,

[31:11]

a place that actually relates with the world on its own terms rather than a place that people come. So that's actually true. That was one of our mission statements. I told the gang a little bit about Linda's barn and about this building, but I never thought of making meeting, meeting together, a kind of part of our mission. That is really true. Yeah, and there are various reasons of historical facts that happened, but we had two foals. We raised some foals. It was great, a very good experience. We took Snip out to Modesto, and she got raped by Jake, a big white stud who was very big, and she had Kate, right? Yeah. Yeah, we green broke what you call green broke a couple of horses, which got them like two years old, and they were not hand-shying.

[32:14]

We could put harness on them, and we could actually put them out just to stay with the horses. Then I can't remember the sequence, but the Dalai Lama did come by. We also never heard about Joe. Oh, Joe. Because that's interesting. What about the Dalai Lama? We'll get to the Dalai Lama. Joe was a Morgan horse that we got from Belenus, and he was the one horse that we worked solo. He was a very bright horse. He'd be plowing, and you have to be in a furrow, and when he got to the end of the row, you could just see him tugging with all his heart to get back in the furrow and come down. We used to cultivate the hill of the potatoes with horses, which is when I became to really like potatoes because the horses would step all over the plants, and they grew. They were okay.

[33:19]

So it was quite an experience. At that point, Wendell Berry had written Unsettling of America, and I did write to him, and he came out. He was part of Linda's farm. Yeah. He spent a lot of time in the field looking around. We spent some time together, and the horses were—what did happen back there? What was that, 1983? No, 1980. That was the first time that I— His holiness came in 1979. He came in 1979. Well, there were issues. What were the issues about animals? Investigating animals to do your work. Yeah, well, that was at Dalai Lama's, and that was not so directly told to me, but it was influential. A lot of people were on that bandwagon, and the Zen Center board decided to get rid of the horses. It was the first time I stood up and fought for what I thought

[34:23]

was right. I had a long meeting in here. It went to midnight. Midnight with Dick, and I stood up to Dick Baker, the hot shot guy. Anyway, we finally did have to get rid of the horses because they let me continue having the horses, but they were getting old, and I didn't get the support that I really needed. My rationale, really, it wasn't like I felt like I gave up a worthwhile thing. The point then with the farm, I think the question was just getting the farm together in a big way. We had been selling a lot of produce, but it wasn't really together. We had to mechanize or get together. We had a stand out here. Tell people a little bit. I don't remember anymore. We had a stand out at... Tanjunction. Tanjunction. We had a gypsy cart, which, in fact, if you go behind the field shed, it's had a couple

[35:27]

transmogrifications, but if you go behind the field shed today, you'd see a cart, just a flat top of plywood and an axle. That was a gypsy wagon that somebody made very elaborate, welded a very elaborate cart that opened up as a vegetable stand so you could display the vegetables, and you'd store the vegetables inside, and then you'd sell them from outside. We're at Tanjunction, and... By the rug store, right? Yeah, and there's a parking lot where... It's not amazing. ...the video arcade is now. That was 25 years ago. So, Peter, what did you say? You said it was getting so large that you had to mechanize or... Well, the farm had to... There was issues in the farm getting together that was not just, you know, horses or not. There were bigger issues, I think. And the movement really was to mechanize

[36:31]

and for... A big reason was the Dalai Lama's making that statement to people. He was here for a couple weeks, I guess. Yeah, actually, he came for an overnight visit, and he really had an incredible time here. He had a number of people in the Bay Area who wanted to see him. One of those people was Lama Govinda. For those of you who've studied Lama Govinda's work, it's the way of life. The Tibetan book of Buddhists. He was a German scholar who became a Tibetan Lama. They'd never met the Dalai Lama, and I'd always miss him in Tibet. And I remember him coming here to visit His Holiness. We had bodyguards. He had his own bodyguards. He had his own bodyguards because it was very, very tight times in 1979. He was not safe or revered in the way he is now. He had to really be protected. And I remember his entourage asking for some Burlese end students. Wayne Cogman, who was one of our friends and peers, a rather new student.

[37:34]

Suddenly, they produced a rock suit for him, and he stood bodyguarding like a Tibetan guardian. Big, buff guy. She said, I like this. This Tibetan guardian of the Dalai Lama of Tibet. So he stood by the door. He came in. He said, may I help you? You'll go, yes, I'm here to see. So His Holiness really liked it here, and he decided to stay. He stayed for a couple of weeks. Yeah, he stayed a long time. He did all of his engagements from Reno. It was amazing. He couldn't do that now. It was different. The times were different, like it was particularly in those years. He also stayed here. We met him about the same time. Camped out a little later. It was, they were not, you know, they didn't have a following there. So what was the statement of the Dalai Lama made in the press? Well, see, he didn't tell me, but something about not wanting, horses shouldn't be doing our work.

[38:36]

To someone in private, he said that? No, like to Yvonne, one of the leaders of Zen Center. It was a public statement, and people were working on it, although the communication wasn't that open. You have to remember that the Dalai Lama is a very good mechanic, and can fix anything. So I just thought there was an appropriate way to do it, you know, with machinery. Anyway, around that time. What could I do? And we stayed as long, and my partner gave it up, and became the director, I guess, and we tried. But I found a good home for the horses, and we had cows, and we had chickens. Chickens we had from the beginning. I think they were from Alan Chadwick, one of his chickens. But chickens were good. And, you know, I mean, it's an earlier part of the dialogue of,

[39:40]

should you eat eggs or not, I suppose. And the rationale then was, well, if we're going to eat them, we should grow them, and we should take care of the birds. So that's what we did then. And I ran the chickens myself for a couple years. It was a good experience. And chickens, the chicken is not a natural animal. It was bred, you know. There wouldn't be, you wouldn't find a chicken in nature. Kind of like the cow, I guess. A cow is basically a cousin of a deer, right? It was just bred. And they bred it for the qualities that they wanted. Chickens, you know, to lay eggs or for meat. So we had a couple hundred birds. We'd buy one-day-old chickens from Murray-McMurray in Iowa City. Had a great catalog, and we'd get these sexed one-day-old chicks in the mail. They were probably two or three days old.

[40:41]

The mailman. I saw a mail postman say, we've got a bunch of them. We'll drive them right out. That's the only time we get it. So we had a little brooder house in a couple places. One at the corner of where the metal shop is, underneath the big eucalyptus tree, next to the gas tanks. And then in the garden shed was the animal headquarters, really. We had hitching rail back there, and we had the corral there. And we lived in the trailer right here. And the windmill was across the way. I remember Peter getting ready to go to the island in the morning. The cow, Daisy Moss-Rose, would put her head out. The stallion, she'd go, muuuuuhhh. Right where the basketball court is, was the milking parlor. And we had jerseys. And that was tacked on, kind of Green Gulch style.

[41:46]

We had a big storm one day, and it picked it up and blew it into the top. And again, cows were the same way. But the bigger ethical question with cows is, what do you do with the bull calves? So that was a real quandary when we were dealing with that. But my feeling continues to be, if you are going to eat eggs and milk, then you should somehow take responsibility. I think it was, you know, I remember there was Howard then, I can't remember his last name. Who was, I'm sorry, I'm remembering. Howard Doerr? No, a different Howard. You'll think of him in a minute. McDonald? Yes. He, on the basis of observing how animals were raised in captivity, became vegan.

[42:48]

This was, you know, the early 70s, and it was fairly unusual, you wouldn't eat eggs. But eggs were a huge part of our diet. That's another thing that was really important. Dairy was, we had cottage cheese and custard and yogurt. We had dairy products all the time. Omelets, hard-boiled eggs, soft-boiled eggs. Did you make cheese? No, but we ate a lot of cheese. No, we experimented with making cheese. And jerseys are very good. They're real high fat content, like 17% or something. And they're the sweetest animals. You wouldn't even need a stanchion to milk them. But you'd have to watch out for that back leg going in the bucket there. When the tail goes up, you got to move that. So we had, there's maybe three of us, and we milked two cows twice a day for a couple years. I mean, it's not just their warm teats in the morning. You just come to love cows, I think, if you work them.

[43:51]

But something about that steam when the milk comes out. The calves slobber so much. They suck the bottom. They're amazing. We had some interesting dialogue. This was, I thought, significant when we brought in this beautiful milk, which is prized in the milk world. I'm sorry, I hope this isn't gross to you. The cream is so rich. And there was a contingent that's more careful and concerned about it. Oh, they wanted to homogenize and pasteurize. So we had this beautiful milk. It was raw from a cow that was raised and taken care of her manically. And then we were burning off the milk and all the good bacteria, which was really inoculating us and giving us the valley, in a way. Pretty much everybody was. Dairy was how we got our protein. We lived a pretty strict vegetarian diet. People were not going out there and eating meat like they do now.

[44:53]

People stayed here, and they depended on this place. Everybody really did eat in the dining room. That was it. Everybody was here. Families didn't have homes. I mean, you never see me in the dining room. But families didn't have... Maybe Dick Baker and family would not eat in the dining room. But we all ate together. So it was really interesting that there was this movement to pasteurize the milk. Well, it takes one or two people. It was all around the same time. It made me think of the compost toilets. We had compost toilets in the fourth field. You all know the field. I know that's the first thing you learn, right? And then there's the fields. In the fourth field, past the refrigerator, I did a 50-foot trench. It was six feet deep. And you could really see a beautiful soil profile. But we had compost toilets all around. We'd drive it down there, pour it in, and then fill, put dirt on top of it.

[45:57]

So there's a whole bunch of compost down there in a strand. But I've never been able to see a difference in growth. So it must be really low. But yeah, we had compost toilets. And then around that same time, I think... And I guess AIDS was just coming on and hepatitis. And people were not quite understanding what was going on. It became illegal then to have compost toilets. So we got low flush. It was a public place. So if we weren't a public place, it would have been okay. The part of Green Gulch, which is an important facet, is that this is a public place. It's not just a hippie commune, a religious commune, or whatever that we have. So people look, county health departments now look at us differently. That, well, you're spending $800,000 on the Zendo.

[47:00]

You need new bathrooms. You need a new septic tank.

[47:03]

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