The Farm

An imaginative senior community project in southern Minnesota

The Farm is a community resource in the making, envisioned by a group of friends and based on a rural property in the countryside south of Minneapolis.

Its co-founder Cynthia writes, “I fell in love with the space at first sight. The farmhouse was built in the 1800s and lovingly restored by the previous owners. There was the six-acre piece of ground with apple trees and green pastures, and the most beautiful barn I’d ever seen! I was hooked. I’d been talking to several of my partners about finding a place where we could start a community of people we care about, where we could age together, support each other and be an important part of the world as we got older, rather than in some kind of a retirement community designed by developers, and then eventually being ‘warehoused’ in a care facility. Seeing our parents limited options as they aged had brought us to the point of thinking, ‘That isn’t what I want for my life!’ We were imagining so many advantages of having productive, healthy work growing our own fresh food, a serene lifestyle connected with nature, and companionship with flexibility. A network of communities unlimited by location – we could travel to visit each other and be at home wherever we went! But how would we get started?

“We have made a tentative start. The new garden is producing early tomatoes, too much kale, and many other beautiful things in the rich Minnesota soil. The apple trees are heavy with ripening fruit. We have plans for chickens, some kind of grazing animals (a cow? goats? alpacas? sheep? maybe a mixed herd?). The beautiful barn is an amazingly large space that could provide an entertainment venue, or perhaps some kind of small business ... the potential seems limitless, as does the work involved to make it happen. 

“And of course there are issues. The concept of a group of older people living together is a zoning use the county may have never considered. My hope is that we can present a plan to them whereby they can appreciate the advantages for the county as a whole, and allow us a special use variance. It’s hard to see how it could create a problem for them: we’re stable citizens, take extraordinary care of the land, don’t create a lot of traffic or pollution, provide employment for local maintenance and construction workers, and add to their sales tax base. 

“We will likely have to dig another well and maybe another septic system if/when we add more homes, but we are taking that slowly for now. We might find internal issues that create problems for us. We will almost certainly have disagreements we have to work through. We might get sick, die early, or need to move away. And yet, the vision is still shining for me ... we want to make it happen. The older I get, the happier I am!”