Widdershins: In a direction opposite to the usual; the wrong way. – Oxford English Dictionary.

It took us over two years to come up with a name for this farm.  We went through all of the permutations of our names, product names, concatenations with “acres,” “farm,” “pastures,” but nothing seemed to really name the spirit of what we’re doing here.  One day I was playing a game with my daughter in which she yells out either widdershins or clockwise and we spin in that direction until we fall over.  As she yelled out “widdershins!” it struck me that here was a word that really described what we’re about.

Widdershins farm is headed in a different direction from the convention — we’re going the wrong way by most accounts.  If the green revolution is what has gotten us in the state we’re in, with desertification and topsoil loss proceeding at a frightening pace, food laden with toxic chemicals, and a civilization threatening epidemic of obesity and lifestyle diseases, then we decided what is needed is a green counterrevolution.  That doesn’t mean we’re going back in time — time only flows one way, and we have no desire to “get back to the good old days.”  At the same time, there are some things we can look back at and miss, like strong communities, healthful food, and meaningful lifestyles.  At Widdershins farm, our goal is to reach back and cherry-pick the best parts of the past, bringing them forward into a future into which we’ve brought the best parts of the present.

The foundation of our philosophy is self-reliance and permanence.  The industrial dream of leisure through use of machinery hasn’t panned out like they thought it would around the turn of the century, but there is a path to leisure and independence.  That path is through self-reliance, at both the individual and community levels.  Our agricultural system is based on ideas from a wide array of sustainable farming sources, but the most influential is the permaculture movement.  When it’s in full tilt, we’ll have hundreds of different perennial crops in permanent positions, providing high quality food for us and our great great grandchildren.  We think that rebuilding agriculture and integrating it with health care and community, we can demonstrate another path forward that will carry humanity into the future, and that’s what we’re doing with our farm.