A sustainable living institute in mid-coast Maine faces an uncertain future. For eight years now, the Stone Soup Institute in Harpswell has been teaching sustainable living techniques to students from all over the world. They come from as a far afield as Vietnam and Poland to learn a variety of skills, explains co-founder Jimmy Cornish, the institute's only full-time instructor.

He says the skills include how to "raise and preserve vegetables for the winter, how to use draft horses for logging and farming, how to spin, how to dye wool with natural dyes, goldenrod root, choke cherry root, how to spin and weave, that sort of thing, how to do some basic blacksmithing, and pottery."

Tom Porter: "So basically you teach people the skills that they would need to never have to go to the shops again?
JC: "Well, I wouldn't say 'never.'"
TP: "I think this corduoroy shirt maybe you bought somewhere."

Cornish was speaking at a recent workshop on how to kill and butcher chickens. It's one of the courses the Stone Soup Institute is still able to offer on the four acres of land it now possesses. Until last summer the institute used to operate on over 20 acres, renting most of that land from a nearby farm.

That land has now been sold, leaving it without the space it needs to teach many of its courses. "What we need is land right now," Cornish says. "We had been leasing a farm for the last six years, and that's where we were teaching our workshops, we had a big woodworking shop in a large barn, had an old farmhouse with a large kitchen so we could put a number of students in there at once, and do some fairly large workshops, a dozen people at a time."

Cornish co-founded the Stone Soup Institute in 2001 with Rolf Hamacher, an artist and educator from Germany, with the intention of establishing an international program. "Our goal, our highest vision, would be to have six students from Europe and six from America spend a year here in our sustainable living program," he says.

For now, the institute is scaled down, but still able to offer one or two-day workshops in things like cheese and soapmaking, textiles, brick oven baking, maple sugaring, and several other disciplines, including the art of butchery.

On a recent rainy morning in Harpswell, three students gathered for a day-long workshop, learning how to pluck and butcher chickens. Before you can do that, though, you have to kill them.

"We raise some chickens, we raised about 15 ducks this year, we're looking at raising a couple of hundred next year, and it's just a small family-run thing we do, it's not a real business at this point," says Dresden resident Rick Suydam. He's here hoping to pick up some tips on how to slaughter poultry, a task which his wife refuses to help him with. "She doesn't mind raising them, but she doesn't want to dispatch them," he says.

For Eliza Jacques and David Meyer, slaughtering birds will be a new experience. Eliza and David recently moved to Maine from Virginia in search of a more rural lifestyle. They already grow vegetables on their three-and-a-half acre plot in Vassalboro, but would also like to keep poultry.

"We definitely want to get laying hens, and one of the reasons we want to do this is we'd like to think about also getting hens for meat and decide if that was something we wanted to try doing as well," Jacques says. "We should know where our meat comes from, if we're going to eat them," Meyer adds.

In this case, the meat comes from six old Cornish hens, whose egg-laying days are long-gone. A cleaver in one hand, Jimmy Cornish grabs the first hen by its feet using his other, and slowly starts swinging it in an underarm movement. This is done for a good reason, he explains. "If you swing them like that, it will make the blood go to the head and make them more docile as you lay them across the chopping block."

In one swift movement, he decapitates the hen. Cornish, of course, makes it look easy - and without going into too much detail, David and Eliza take a little longer to dispatch their first hens.

Once the headless bird lies still, Jim Cornish performs a curious native American ritual, and sprinkles tobbaco on the carcass.

JC: "That was a song to release the spirits and a little gift of tobacco for their journey. It is a belief amongst the Lakota people that all things have spirit. And now that the spirit has left these chickens, it goes back to the hole to become whatever it will become next. We give them a gift and thank them for the life and eggs that they've given us, and the nourishment they'll give us with their body and the nourishment that it will give back to the earth."
TP: "What's the tobacco for?"
JC: "The tobacco is a sacred herb amongst the Lakota. All herbs have either masculine or feminine property to them, and tobacco is one of the few that has both, it's a masculine and feminine properties to it, so it's very highly regarded."
TP: "Why do you use this Lakota Sioux ritual?"
JC: "Well, that's what I am. I am Lakota. I was adopted about 10 or 11 years ago now. That's my journey."

Their souls may have gone to the afterlife, but the birds' mortal remains are taken to a nearby timber frame barn, where Jimmy Cornish teaches the students how to pluck and eviscerate the carcasses.

When he's not teaching these "lost skills," as he calls them, Cornish spends much of his time traveling the region, talking to landowners and potential investors in an effort to secure the acreage the institute really needs to fulfill its mission.

More more information on the institute, go to www.stone-soup-institute.org