Earthaven Internship Program

This project will provide hands-on experience with aspects of pastured animal agriculture.

• Working with cattle, pigs, and poultry, including feeding and watering, rotational grazing, and health checks
• Learning the basics of keeping a family cow
• Farming grass, including maintaining pastures, rotational grazing, annual and perennial forage tending, and compost building
• Using agricultural by-products, such as skim milk, manure, spent brewers’ grains, and other organic matter, as agricultural inputs, for example to feed animals, compost piles, and the soil
• Practical, including permanent, semi-permanent, and tempory electric fencing to support rotational grazing
• Making and storing butter, bone broth, and other nutrient-dense animal products
• Optional: Humane harvesting (slaughtering and processing) of broiler chickens (or possibly a large animal, such as a pig or steer)

Elizabeth has been getting her hands dirty in Western North Carolina since 2004. After graduating from Warren Wilson College in 2006 with a made-up degree in “Social and Activist Theater,” she began pursuing a life more deeply connected to food and other basic human needs. She began a love affair with cows in 2010 while work-exchanging on a neighborhood farm at Earthaven. Since 2013 she has been running a small subsistence farm operation in the community, where, along with the support of many others, she tends to a variety of animals, along with the plants and land that feed them.

This project will cover the process of building a modern integrated natural home for Adam and his family of five.

• Construction using place-appropriate materials and building techniques
• Finding the balance between natural materials, re-used materials, and purchased materials
• Milling trees into lumber for use in the house
• Applying natural lime plaster for exterior finishes
• Human-scale design and social implications of architecture

Adam has decades of experience as a builder, with a focus on natural building. He has designed and built a rustic log cabin, a modern stick-frame home, a traditional timber frame dairy barn, passive greenhouses, and many smaller structures. He enjoys the process of working with the resources of a given site to create buildings that are beautiful through their harmony with the natural local vernacular.

This project will provide hands-on experience with aspects of pastured small animal agriculture on a homestead scale.

• Developing and maintaining habitat for small animal agriculture with the goals of minimizing inputs and building soil fertility
• Tending an integrated site that includes forage trees, pasture, and annual vegetable production
• Learning the basics of animal husbandry concerning dairy goats, pigs, rabbits, and poultry
• Optionally slaughtering and processing small animals and poultry.
• Philosophically exploring the sacred intersections of farming, animism, ecology, grief, love, and deep belonging to place.

Rachel is a trauma-informed clinical herbalist turned small farmer who has a never ending curiosity around how we can sustain ourselves in concert with nature. She came to Earthaven in 2017 with her four children, now teenagers and young adults, who participate in a family farm with an egg CSA, goats, and pigs. She is driven by her passion for homegrown food and the sacred work of growing and raising it in right relationship with the land, and sharing that joy with others.

This project will tend and improve Earthaven’s off-grid infrastructure systems, including water, waste, power, access, and buildings.

• Repairing community buildings
• Tending roads and trails
• Creating solar access
• Processing firewood
• Monitoring and managing water and power systems

Brandon works with chainsaws, hand tools, heavy equipment, construction projects, water systems, and most everything having to do with the practicalities of ecological design. He lives at Earthaven in an off-grid duplex, practicing community, partnering, parenting, and philosophizing about existence and how to optimize it. Brandon is the Organic Growers School Consulting Director and Sustainability Coach, providing support services to farmers, homesteaders, gardeners, and those seeking sustainability solutions.

This project will improve the maintainability and expand the uses of the campground orchard.

• Managing the orchard understory, potentially making biochar
• Planting nut trees and berry bushes
• Improving orchard hardscape, including paths and potentially campsites
• Tending the village cemetery with villagers
• Processing fruits and nuts, and optionally making mead

Debbie comes from a long line of orchardists and plant breeders. She fell in love with forest gardens during her permaculture design certificate program and leaves a trail of fruit trees behind her. She moved to Earthaven Ecovillage in 2007 and has been involved in governance, promotions, and partnership culture, and was a partner in the Useful Plants Nursery for eight years. In 2008, she and another villager started developing the campground orchard. Her current interests include growing fruits and nuts, and stewarding the orchard cemetery. She is drawing on her technical and management background to develop and promote SOIL online learning programs.

Griffin moved to the Earthaven area in the fall of 2002. She began learning about permaculture, natural building, living off grid, fermentation and community living. In 2005, she bought an acre of land near Earthaven. Over the years, she planted fruiting and medicinal plants and built a tiny house with the help of dear friends. Being raised by parents who owned a garden center, Griffin grew up with a passion for growing plants. In 2006, she began an edible landscaping business and planted thousands of useful plants around the Carolinas. In 2009, she earned a degree in Sustainable Development and Appropriate Technology at Appalachian State University. Currently, Griffin lives in Earthaven with her family, teaches yoga in the village, and owns a small wine business called Alchemy Herbal Wines.

• Creating an inch of topsoil every year through cover crops, mulch, and soil science
• Cultivating, harvesting, and processing corn into masa, cornmeal, and grits
• Cultivating mushrooms and harvesting sweet potatoes
• Growing in hoop houses and the greenhouse
• Keeping bees
• Growing turmeric in temperate climates as a cash crop

Leon has been farming the hillsides of this mountain valley for nearly 30 years. His main crops are Ohio Blue Clarage dent corn, sweet potatoes, shiitake mushrooms, turmeric, honey, and his beloved 20 varieties of bamboo, but you can find everything from kale to persimmons and pomegranates on his 10 acres of permaculture performance art. He is a generalist of the highest order, fluidly moving between farming, mechanics, carpentry, forestry, earthworks, electrical, and more. He loves to talk about just about everything, but has a special fondness for the intersection of evolution, history, and geopolitics.

This Empowered Community Living workshop will run all six weeks of the Internship and cover subject matter ranging from: Community Communication Tools to Shared Decision Making and on to Tending the Collective Nervous System, among others.

An inveterate adventurer, Becky (she/her) has grown to see life itself as the adventure. That life is made richer in community at Earthaven where Becky, her daughter Willow, and her co-parent Sanne moved in 2018.

Becky loves taking lofty creative visions and bringing them to life — whether her own or others’. In her first career as an educator, she taught at an arts-integrated charter school, mentored gap-year students in India and Guatemala, and created a holistic middle school. Since then, she has produced two documentary films, coached individuals and couples toward greater wholeness, and begun holding mediations.

Becky is excited to bridge and share the life she is devoted to creating at Earthaven Ecovillage with the greater world.