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Pictured speaker / quoted attribution: Davis Harper, article; photo credit Marc Lutz Recovered pictured passage; not a claim to the full source. Passage boundary: Source: archive.nickroutledge.org/post/1826994674390994988 Preserve quoted-author distinctions; the containing tweet does not confer authorship. Back to the Land Earth Abides Farm addressing local food insecurity Enterprise photos by Marc Lutz Nick Routledge, above, talks about operations at Earth Abides Farm in Sheep Ranch. The farm grows a variety of crops which it donates to local food providers. One of the many vegetables, below, grown by farm flourishes. By DAVIS HARPER DAVIS@CALAVERASENTERPRISE.COM On an 80-acre plot of land in Calaveras County that several Catholic Worker families have called home over the past four decades, a new trio of organic farmers has settled in with a holistic approach to solving local food insecurity. At the end of a battered road snaking through forestland northeast of Sheep Ranch, a clearing with massive solar panels and a distant fenced garden signals that you’ve arrived at Earth Abides Farm. The farm was founded in 1976 by a group of seven San Franciscans living in the Martin de Porres House, who at the time were seeking to establish a Catholic Worker Farm Community, according to a newsletter from 2006. Dating back to the early 1930s, the Catholic Worker Movement is a back-to-the-land movement founded on principles of self-sufficiency, serving the poor and resisting war and social injustice. The off-the-grid homestead in Sheep Ranch was the site of a retreat center for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients in the 1980s, and was home to several community members over the years. It’s been a place for meditation and prayer; a home for troubled youth, battered women, people with drug and alcohol addictions and the homeless; and an evidently prosperous candle business. More recently, the farm was providing housing for 11 Americorps volunteers that were working on local fire prevention work, but the project ended prematurely in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the farm’s founders grew older and the children moved away, stewarding the property was becoming challenging, according to Facilities Manager and Oakland native Eric Christian, who moved to the farm earlier this year. Around 2015, some of the last remaining founders moved to Sonora, and a young couple was left to take care of the farm, which was tied up in a land trust governed primarily by Catholic Workers that had lived on the land. In early 2019, the couple helped arrange a gifted land transfer to Canticle Farm, a nonprofit urban farm and educational center based in Oakland that shares a similar mission. It was around that time that Nick Routledge transplanted from Oregon to help restore the property and start a bountiful garden. The long-term goal is to grow locally climate- see Farm, A7 Retained uncertainty: [{"passage": "Final article sentence after locally climate-", "reason": "Page explicitly continues see Farm A7; continuation page not among pictured original or exact saved sources. Last word is cut at line/page transition; do not infer continuation."}, {"passage": "Angled plant stake lettering within lower photograph", "reason": "Only fragments of handwriting are visible in oblique small photo; cannot certify complete variety label from full-resolution original. Article text is legible."}]