Who We Are
“Being a part of a community that is striving to live spiritual ideals in practical reality is an exciting and fulfilling vocation.”
Plowshare Farm is an attempt to be responsive to the social, human, spiritual and ecological challenges of our times by creating a truly inclusive environment where every person and every aspect of the natural world can be learned from and valued.
We are a small, thriving community in southern New Hampshire where lives are shared, where nourishing the land in turn nourishes the individual who is tending that land, and where animal care creates the potential for people who are usually the care receivers to become the care givers. The pace of life is slower to be all inclusive, and people with a wide range of abilities and capabilities find meaningful work and self-respect here.
As an anthroposophic lifesharing community affiliated with the worldwide Camphill Movement, we enjoy a vibrant spiritual life, along with a close connection with the Christian Community in New England.
Plowshare Farm is a community where people with a wide range of abilities and capabilities live and work together to create a genuinely inclusive neighborhood of the broader community, forging opportunities for every member of the community to reach for their full potential. Harmonious to this task come a wide variety of activities which support Plowshare Farm’s striving to be a vessel for the balanced and healthy unfolding of the human being. How this manifests and the exact nature of our daily tasks are more challenging to describe.
At Plowshare Farm, there are many complexities of relationships and inter-weavings. We are a group of people who live together in what we call lifesharing homes. We are a biodynamic farm. We are a bakery, woodwork and candle-making workshops. We are a vocational training center for people with varying capabilities who join us during the daytime. We are a ‘safe port’ for those who, within their lives’ journeys, need some time in a haven for repair. We are fertile ground for other initiatives to meet, germinate and grow. We are a place where the line between caregiver and care receiver is blurred through the understanding that we each have something to learn from the other and that caring for someone or something else is often a very fine path for self-development.
At the heart of these layers is a conscious reaching toward the unfolding of what is truly human in us. Questions such as, "What am I, in my deepest Self, striving toward?" and "What is my nobler Self and how might I become it?" are questions which all of us have an opportunity to explore within the structure of our daily lives. As a community, we carry the questions, "How can we reach toward a relationship with our natural resources that is sustainable? How can we participate in bringing about social renewal? How can we stand as a beacon for conscious, interdependent living?"