I took the news of John Prine passing away last week a little hard. His music holds a special place in the mythology of the Food Farm. When telling the story of Jane and John founding the farm, we often turn to the lyrics to Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream.”

“We blew up our TV, threw away our paper. Went to the country, built us a home.”

They moved from Oregon to Holyoke in 1975 to start a farming community during the height of that decade’s back-to-the-land movement. Author and farmer Gene Logsdon expressed the mission of that dream as “the kind of independence that defines succe...