Allen Ginsberg: Minnesota. Midwest. Further west. Talking with a poet who also is a fellow sādhana, whose family is from that area for many generations, whose brother has a thousand acres of land, and he himself has 160 acres of land. And as farming is done now in America, apparently 160 acres is not enough to support a farm economically because farming is done now in such large scale with machines.
Kīrtanānanda: You can use those machines if you want. If you want to live in the so-called American style, that is so. But if you're willing to adopt the Vedic way of minimizing the material needs in order to pursue Kṛṣṇa consciousness, what does one need? He needs sufficient food to keep the body healthy and a place to lay down. So four acres is plenty.
Allen Ginsberg: Where do you get the... How do you feed the cow, or would you?
Kīrtanānanda: On four acres you can do it.
Allen Ginsberg: You can get enough hay for a cow, for...?
Prabhupāda: Fodder. Yes. We grow.
Guest: On food, it depends on what part of the east?
Allen Ginsberg: He's a farmer.
Guest: Whereabouts? What part? Cause a cow has to have about three acres for grazing.
Kīrtanānanda: So at most five acres. It's in that vicinity.
Allen Ginsberg: See we are interested in this problem of minimizing.
Prabhupāda: So let us cooperate.
Allen Ginsberg: And doing organic farming and minimizing the effort and also the material demands.
Kīrtanānanda: You can grow sufficient vegetables on a fraction of an acre.
Allen Ginsberg: Yes. We had a big vegetable garden this year, too. I've been doing farming... Peter has been doing a great deal of farming.
Hayagrīva: How are you tilling your land?
Guest: We have a friend who comes out with a plow.
Allen Ginsberg: You're doing it by hand?
Kīrtanānanda: We just got a horse.
Hayagrīva: We just got a horse. We had bad experience with a rotary tiller. We got rid of it.
Kīrtanānanda: West Virginia. We gave it away.
Allen Ginsberg: So we're also going through a coovy(?) āśrama for poets. A little farm for poets.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Farming, agriculture, that is nice. There is a proverb: agriculture is the noblest profession. Is it not said? Agriculture is noblest, and Kṛṣṇa was farmer, His father.