La Buena Vida Farm in Portal, AZ is the home of husband and wife Jerry and Jennifer Racicot, along with their three young children. A woman named Eva also lives on the property in her Airstream and helps out around the farm. Jerry and Jennifer’s friend, Nicole, was also visiting at the time I was there, staying for a month in order to decide if she will also live permanently on the farm, taking her three children with her from Ashville, NC.
A community is what Jerry and Jennifer are trying to form. The population in Portal is 200 and very spread out, and the couple are aware that to make their vision for the farm work, they need more people. Forming an intentional community would allow them to diversify their economy.
The property is a couple of miles down a dirt road, just off highway 80. When I arrived, Jerry showed me around. They have two acres in cultivation. At this time of year, most of what is growing is in a 100-foot cold-frame hoop-house (like a greenhouse, but without any electric climate control— no heaters or fans). The warm moist hoop-house had that chocolately compost smell, and was green with lettuces, carrots, cabbage and kale. The cost of the cold-frame construction was $2200. Jerry said that you can purchase a kit to the tune of ten grand, but by purchasing the tools to bend the steel poles into arches himself, Jerry was able to cut costs significantly. He and a friend built it– he estimates it took 30 man-hours.
The family keeps a large store of food on hand– at least 2 months worth, Jerry said. This allows them to go into town (an hour’s drive) less frequently, and to be prepared in a situation where they may not be able to procure food easily. When I asked him if he thought the you-know-what would hit the fan, he said, “Well, I think the writing’s on the wall.”
But enough with the housing metaphors— I asked Jerry why he and Jennifer chose Arizona of all places to live when moving from L.A. 2 years ago. He said there were many reasons, but the first of which was that they wanted to be “far away from anything.” They had a worrisome feeling that America would soon be changing, and he wanted to be somewhere where they would be left alone. He also wanted to be within a three hour drive of an airport so he could still work as a fashion photographer. Continuing his work in photography did not work as he had planned, however. Jobs stopped coming once he was outside the hub of Los Angeles. Farming was also not in his scope of planning— instead, he and Jennifer had decided to start a small garden for their own use, and, suddenly they had neighbors calling and requesting to buy some of their produce. The community was hungry for fresh, local produce, and the Racicot’s realized this was the niche they were destined to fill.
Now, farming is their main occupation, along with animal husbandry. They have pigs, chickens, a horse, goats, sheep, and geese, although they plan to concentrate their efforts on just a couple of animals in the future. The horse is on its way to working a plow and pulling their produce to the tiny Portal town center 25 miles away, where the family runs a farm stand in the warm months. Jennifer and Jerry feel that, instead of farming as a conscious choice, this path was formed and decided for them by God. All of the forces pushing them in this direction have convinced them that this is where they belong, and this is what they belong doing.
As a photographer, Jerry was away from home 2 to 3 weeks each month. He barely got to see his children. Now, even though he is making far less money, he feels this lifestyle is much better for his family. Speaking of his children, Jerry exclaimed, “They won’t remember the things I bought for them or all the money I gave them. They don’t care. They play in the manure!” What they do care about, Jerry concludes, is quality time with their parents– a valuable interaction that living at the farm allows.
The family works hard, and they seem to have everything they could ever want in their nook of the world. They truly are living ‘la buena vida’.
