“I learned how to milk ... Yes, the goats were growing, they got babies. I learned how to milk them and how to take care of them, to make cheese. I was very interested in making different cheeses. It was all learning by doing. The same was with the forest, with making bread, with cereals. We started to collect old grains and to grow them. There were a lot of young people who were very interested in learning exactly that, you know. Most of the volunteers who came were like ‘yes when we are older, we want to do exactly the same, we want to go back to the roots and just learn how to live from the land.’ Now there is more and more people like that.”
“Yes, it's really interesting to know how things work, and my experience is that they do work.
The project was a family project. However, this was too much hard work, you know. I worked up to 16–17 hours a day. It's too much work, so I thought of two, three families. It's a very good way to live together. Several times, we have lived with another family. With one family, it worked perfectly. They are now in another project. They are about twenty people. They were shepherd family from Austria, with Jewish roots, so this combination was very good to combine up with us. They had two small children when they came to our place, one was 8 months old. The first glimpse I saw when I came in, it was a baby sitting on the table. They were living in shepherd trailers and the baby was sitting in the middle of the table. I came in and the baby had a big knife in his hand, a really big one. The knife was a half as big as a baby. And the carrot in the other hand … And was like cutting a carrot. But then I said, OK, relax. Forget it! It was actually very good for me. They could completely trust nature. They could completely trust themselves and their babies. For me, that was a very important step on my way. Now, we are very good friends, but separated in our places. They were living with us for nearly three years.”
“There was one shepherd in Austria, Gunther's father, in the eastern part of Austria, and he was wandering around. He was the only one … In the best times, he had more than 1,000 sheep. His boys grew up with the sheep. The family that lived with us in the farm in Austria, that was his son with his wife and kids. When they came to our place, they had nothing. And there, I got to know what I think is an ideal community because they were very independent, very centered in themselves, grown up people, adult people, because most people these days are babies, babies all their life ... So with adult people, I would love to have contact.”