New Buffalo: Journals from a Taos Commune

by Arthur Kopecky, Peter Coyote (Foreword)

New Buffalo was one of the most successful of the collective farms that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Arthur Kopecky's journals take us back to that era as he and his comrades wend their way to the area near Taos, New Mexico, where they encounter magic, wisdom, a mix of people, the Peyote Church, planting, and hard winters. The journals trace the group's evolution to adulthood as the party mood of the early 1970s gives way to the concerns of maintaining a growing farm. By 1975, several hundred people had called New Buffalo home and the business turned away from their counterculture goats, focusing, instead, on dairy cows.
"New Buffalo was emblematic of any number of communes where people came together by happenstance and "grew" a life together. The struggle and costs, the hard work, the endless labor and attention required to be self-sufficient; the learning of new skills, social and physical, that made every day an adventure are all here. . . . Remember or learn what it felt like to be young, optimistic, empowered and dedicated to making a better life. You will be amazed to see what persistent, dedicated, selfless, hard work can accomplish."--Peter Coyote, actor, activist, and former resident of the Olema commune

312 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2004

Reviews

[Avery Hardy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this deep dive into the local lore into New Buffalo commune. The unedited journal format gets a bit tiresome, though.

[adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

having been in Taos this summer, I got curious about what had happened to the several agricultural communes that had been there in the 60s-70s but largely were no more. this journal was largely too scattered to draw too many conclusions from but a few things I pieced together were:

- Buffalo Commune never developed a formal process for accepting/rejecting members. There were constant joining/leavings.

- Work ethic and willingness to share varied greatly between members and overall the group waxed/waned in these as people arrived/left. Again, no formal procedures for dealing with this. Eventually the hardest workers started to leave (often to start their own homesteads), the commune members shifted to a less work-oriented group and the commune eventually failed.

- Paying the bills was similarly disorganized - money got donated, usually spent on necessities soon after.

- It took ~5 summers to figure out how to get the farm producing well. Given their water/climate, they thought it best to graze cows/goats for a milk cash-crop, farm feed crops for the grazers, and grow vegetables for themselves.

[Deidre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Diary entries from Kopecky's time on NM commune.