Farms Designed for Autistic Living and Work

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The legal status already exists. Call it a School, Work Study, Sheltered Workshop, Assisted Living, or a Cult, and you are exempt from most laws.

About the only exception is Sales Tax, paid by the customer. When the Mississippi Band of Choctaw started growing as a business, they used a lot of Reservation exemptions, then over paid their local taxes. The extra went for better education, fire protection, police, which was support for their whole community. When there is an election, they give to both canidates, for good government costs. Giving to both shows you seek no favor, only support the will of the people.

Most rural areas have small families spread out. An autistic community would be a larger group, so have the manpower to go out and clean up things like trash along the roads, and plant flowers. Lady Bird Johnston got a lot of flowers planted along Texas roads, it still looks good.

There is no permission needed to clean the public right of way and spread seeds. When a mile turn red on both sides of the road, it is community betterment.

In U-Pick a covered pavilion with stainless tables, water, crops can be processed, bagged, and ready to fill your freezer, cheap, fresh, and for a few dollars more, with some local help.

While you are at it, collect canned goods, donate it to the food bank.

Work the, everyone eats, message.

Nursery plants for the Garden Club, and provide the labor to turn beds. Leave it to them to plant the garden in prepared soil. Garden Clubs have more clout than biker gangs. There is always some project like paint the town museum that never has the money, provide the money, labor, paint, and then vanish and let them have the playground.

Become part of the community, bring them food security, social support, and they will support you in turn.

Everything is Political and Economic, we can be important.

With 400,000 that are already on the way, this could be bigger for small towns than having a prison. Whatever brings in the money sells.

I see full employment for the less disabled in setting this up, with the more disabled as advisors. It will be over staffed, more people than needed, so if half take the day off, it still runs.

Something of a big group home area, with crops, and various activities.

It will take a while to get this right, and a lot of people who have been living in group homes are conditioned to just that. Change is evil, for a while. How to intergrate people into the life will take study.

Turning pasture into crop land takes a while, uses big machines, and only some of us should run tractors, loaders, spreaders. Trucks coming and going, buildings going up, a bunch of noise and confusion. After a while it becomes settled, plant and harvest, then a bunch of strangers coming to pick.

No everyone is suited to everything, there will have to be quite places.

Some things are plant and forget, others like flowers, nursery, take constant tending. Some are quick, two months, other like landscape, trees, take years. If people might live there forever, orchards, walks, flowering trees, formal gardens, an ever becoming better place. A productive farm can become a major park.

I would think someplace with a mild four season climate.

I was thinking about doing a worm farm because worm pooh teas made with special equipment and the casting are like black gold. Traditional crops do not allow for enough profitability to expand upon the premise to employ more. I do not believe in the sustainability of government funded programs like work programs so that is why I invest into disability candle making because partnering with the right U.S component manufactures and with the right equipment candles there are profits from because it is kind of like the wine market. People will pay good money for them and still yet be surprised at the fragrance performance quality compared to even more expensive ones then become loyal. Pure worm castings are expensive and other products can be made from it like concentrated liquid teas for home gardening fertilization.

I have raised worms. It is nature's best machine. Their favored food is brown cardboard, which has become cheap, not much recycling in a down market, and available as donations.

I have also raised dirt. Dirt becomes productive when it has soil bacteria, and worms. Most of our topsoil has become impoverished by mining it. A live soil can be sold by the bag, truckload, and there is never enough.

Both Tesla and Darwin wrote about the magic of soil.

Note that it was for autistic people who want to work there, not forcing them to work there.

And it's not that bad of work.

The Amana Colonies didn't do too badly. Yes, that's Amana as in microwave ovens (the Amana Radarange - I believe they invented the microwave oven!) and refrigerators. The colonies started as a cluster of self-supporting intentional communities - sound familiar? - and set up a manufacturing arm in the late 1940s (possibly because their Aspies didn't like working on the farm? ). That manufacturing organization functioned for 50 years before being bought by a large appliance manufacturer. The colonies still exist today, see link.

Then there's the Catholic Worker Movement. Another cluster of self-supporting intentional communities.

The model can work, and well - it's just a question of whether one's temperament is suited to it.

There's a farm in Michigan called AACORN, I think it sounds pretty cool. They sound like they've been having some issues with funding though =(

Their website looks a bit out-of-date, I've been following them on Facebook: http://www.aacornfarm.org

There was some recent talk on this site several weeks ago about building a retreat (or something like that) for Autistics in the high mountains of New Mexico. They were looking for volunteers to come help build it.

It didn't take long to find. Here's a link: https://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=356014