Acorn Community

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities has a Mutual Aid Scholarship Fund designed to fund communards in learning and developing skills that are beneficial to their communities.  Over the last two years, this fund is used for individual communards (Ingrid and Darles from Acorn, and Petey of East Wind) to go to workshops on topics such as permaculture or natural building.  It’s also been used to partially fund communards for communities tours (Darles for her natural building tour of communities in the United States, and Virgil of East Wind for a Eurorail pass to visit communities in the European Union).

This year, the FEC approved funding for the vehicle costs for a mutual aid trip sending East Wind’s slaughter and butchering crew to Acorn in February.  They sent us:  Ryn (their butcher), Jaime (their general manager and slaughter expert), Shari and Taralynn (Ryn’s right-hand butchers), Dandelion and Faolyn (helpful slaughter hands).

It was wildly successful.  We processed 7 yearling goats and 11 6-month old piglets.  We purchased a meat grinder in preparation for this, and they brought their sausage press.  Taralynn took pictures and made a comic book-style guide to scraping intestines for sausage casings and identifying organs and put a large portion of the information together into a pork processing guide.  Mike built a tank for scalding pigs that we used for the first time.  Ryn brought us veterinary coloring books and butchering guides.  We made pork chops and goat chops, uncured bacon, hams, and lots and lots of sausage of various kinds.   We had people from Sapling Community and Cambia Community come over and take advantage of the learning opportunities as well.

I was going to upload you photos, but it’s taking forever, so let me just promise that it was awesome and that we are a highly photogenic bunch.