Black Hammer actually bought some land. Holy shit.
Remember that commune of hippies tilling rocks from Easy Rider? Same energy.
This is Dashcon: the Ethnostate
Off the top of my head I can think of a few economic bases of the last back-to-the-land farm commune wave, and how they might work today.
A ‘70s farm boom. Not likely to be repeated, and if it is the farm market has been significantly consolidated from the family ops of old and in commodity production would still be at a competitive disadvantage.
Arbitrage between land valued as if the farm market was still rail-based and a modern highway world. Now exhausted, though moves back to mass transit might change settlement patterns altering local markets below.
A way to get cheap skilled labor into the countryside at all. America has always been thirsty for farm labor, thin on the ground and tending to shift to urban industry. A high-morale workforce educated in permaculture, etc. not demanding high wages is an advantage that can allow an edge over capital- and scale- focused Big Ag in smaller markets.* Such as:
Organics. While not a huge market, enough of the '70s wave evolved into capitalist apparatus that you’d need to find a particular in here or develop a specific market yourself and you’d only have the edge until they figured out how to replicate it or at best buy you out.
Local sales. Through farmers’ markets a/o farm-to-table restaurants. This requires local or at least tourist markets that can and want to pay for it. Established markets are basically saturated, you’d have to develop them or at least get in on population shifts. Like the boom from Idaho down to “Zoom towns” in Colorado. IF ONLY THAT WASN’T EXACTLY WHERE EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO DO THIS HAD BEEN GOING FOR HALF A CENTURY
Illegal drugs. High-value cash crop, this is how Northern California’s weed-growing “Emerald Triangle” happened last time. Shielded from some market and other stressors, unusually exposed to others. Compare S. American coca and Afghan poppies, but thing is that kinda exhausts the list of plants. (Compare Appalachian moonshining’s processing basis) Maybe tobacco if they get more Prohibitionist there, or get in on shrooms/mescaline/ayahuasca before they legalize that too.
That reminds me, there’s an Oregon program starting up for centers In unincorporated areas to have guides lead people on mushroom trips. Do that.
Legal intoxicants. You know wine country, like 2 hours outside the city with vineyards and bed & breakfasts for weekend getaways and charming restaurants and mason jar wedding venues? Every city has that, it’s a thing state colleges do that started at Berkeley (Napa Valley) and Cornell (Finger Lakes) to revitalize the outlying marginal farming areas now that a national food market rendered them superfluous. Maybe find a city that’s just crossed the line into rating one?
* Small-sale organic farming now significantly survives on labor from hippie-ish college grads who study sustainable farming, who burn out in 2-3 years when they realize they didn’t go to fucking college to be underpaid peasant/farmhand/sexual tributes to cultish white-haired Boomers.
