Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa

11. Maharishi Vedic City

maharishi vedic city ° 167 11 Maharishi Vedic City When Bob Palm looked into setting up a hog-feeding operation on his family farm in 2007, he had no clue just how much of a stir he would create . He eventually had to do battle with leaders of the TM Movement, who had set up a most unusual city next door to him—one of the most unusual cities in America—just six years before. The peacefulness and harmony that the movement espouses faded fast in the nasty fight between Palm and officials of Maharishi Vedic City (MVC). The battle also highlights the tension that still lingers, forty years on, between locals—the townies of the Fairfield area—and the followers of the late guru, the “roos.” Palm’s family had operated the farm since 1894, when his grandfather and uncle built a sturdy, two-bedroom house on the site where the farmer was born and still lives. He and two brothers call the place “Palms of Dellahome,” naming it after the dairy herd that their parents bought in 1942 and long tended on the property. The farm includes 149 acres that border on MVC and another 80 acres on the other side of a nearby road. The dairy operation is gone, but the Palms now raise corn and soybeans there. “All three brothers in our family own it together,” says Palm, who was age sixty-three in mid2012 . “That was my folks’ wish and it’s our wish to pass it on to our kids.” To find a way to bring his son into the farm business in a way that made financial sense, Palm explored the idea of putting in a hog-feeding operation. Hisplancalledforapairofbuildingsthatwouldeachhousetwenty-fourhundred pigs at a time. The hogs would be fattened in the so-called concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) and then sent off to a slaughterhouse 168 ° chapter 11 some fifty miles away. While lucrative for farmers, such hog-confinement operations have generated a stink in Iowa and beyond over issues ranging from the humane treatment of animals to odor and pollution. Palm insisted his facilities would have toed the mark on state regulations, including such features as underground concrete pits with ten-inch-thick walls to keep waste from leaching into groundwater and carbon filters to minimize odor. He planned to plant trees to shield the site. “I wasn’t going to do anything where I wasn’t exposing myself twice as much,” he says. His house, he suggests , would be just a sniff away from the buildings. But when the officials of MVC caught wind of Palm’s plan, they leapt into action. To them, the hog operation seemed like an existential threat, jeopardizingthehealth -promoting,resort-likecommunitytheywerecreating.Residents and visitors alike would be revolted by the hog-fattening operation. They also feared it would make life unbearable for hundreds of young scholars —pandits—whom they were bringing in periodically from India to live in barracks-like facilities less than a mile from Palm’s farm. “Since campuses and other development in the city would have been directly downwind from the CAFO, this was a major concern to residents and other members of the surrounding community,” Maureen Wynne, a councilwoman in the city and former city attorney, told me. Wynne, who is also the wife of Mayor Robert G. Wynne, compared the move to building a landfill next door.1 Indeed, given the sensibilities of the residents and backers of MVC, it would have been far worse than any landfill. Chartered in July 2001 as the first new city set up in Iowa in nearly twenty years, MVC was created by TM adherents to showcase the movement’s principles for living and building in accord with what the movement calls Natural Law. All land in the city is USDA-certified organic. All products sold there, particularly food, must be organic, and synthetic pesticides and fertilizers are big no-nos. Conceived of first as the Maharishi Center for Health and World Peace, the city has its own constitution—called the Constitution of the Universe and drawn from ancient Vedic literature—and adopted Sanskrit as its “ideal language.” Nearly all thirteen hundred residents, as of mid-2012, are meditators, according to Kent Boyum, the city’s director of government relations and of economic development. The population includes a group of eight hundred to maharishi vedic city ° 169 eleven hundred Indian scholars, or pandits...