About Fairfield

Big Green Summer is hosted by Surya Nagar Farm Iowa . Surya Nagar has been off the electric grid for 15 years. Surya Nagar Farm is located in southeast Iowa, in the town of Fairfield. In 2006, Mother Earth News magazine named Fairfield one of the "Ten best places to live that you have never heard of". In 2006, Fairfield won a Great Places grant from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs. Big Green Summer and Abundance Ecovillage are projects that are supported under the grant.

Fairfield/Jefferson County is the home to 10,000 people, home to Maharishi University of Management, and headquarters for the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States. Several thousand people meditate together twice a day, many gathering morning and evening in two huge golden domes built for this purpose twenty years ago. This gives Fairfield a much different flavor than most small southeast Iowa towns. We have 10 vegetarian restaurants, a truly awesome health food store, a movie theatre, 3 theatre companies, several dance troupes, regular classical Indian music concerts, and a multi-cultural atmosphere created by people from over 80 countries who live, work, and study in Fairfield.

In addition to the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Siddhis programs, there is a wide range of spiritual disciplines available in Fairfield. Opportunities abound to take a yoga class, learn Sanskrit, participate in Vedic ceremonies, see traveling saints, and participate in Native American rituals. Founded more than 30 years ago, Maharishi University of Management (MUM) offers a wide range of traditional academic programs (physics, electrical engineering, computer science, sustainable agriculture, biology, the arts, music, English literature, psychology, etc) in addition to unique programs in Vedic Science including Ayurved, Jyotish, Sthapatya Ved and vedic litterature. MUM meal service is 100% organic, and the University grows most of the vegetables for its food service year round in a 1 acre greenhouse and 10 acres of outdoor production.

Big Green Summer founder Lonnie Gamble is also a founding faculty member in the 4-year Sustainable Living Program at MUM. MUM web site Click on "podcasts" to hear Lonnie talk about designing a sustainable world.

Fairfield is also a hot bed for experimentation and use of natural building materials and renewable energy. There are over 40 homes utilizing energy from the sun or wind, several of them are off-grid. This makes Fairfield the renewable energy capital of Iowa, with one the highest concentrations of solar powered homes in the US. There are dozens of homes constructed of a wide range of of natural materials- straw, clay, rammed earth, wood chip/concrete blocks, and hemp blocks. Fairfield hosts an annual environmental conference called Ecofair, and has hosted the midwest Bioneers conference.

Fairfield has a dynamic arts and performance culture, with live music several nights a week at various venues including Big Green Summer favorite Cafe Paradiso. Once a month, Fairfield hosts Artwalk, with thousands of visitors, performances, gallery shows, jugglers, mimes, food and more, Fairfield hosts several theatre troops.

Check out the City of Fairfield web site here