This community can only exist because it's a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, depersonalized, "dirty" society which handles all the big problems for them. Problems including: National defense, international relations, technological research and infrastructure, advanced education, manufacture/import/transport of all kinds of exotic goods and medicines, law enforcement, care of the elderly.
It's easy to say it's a better way to live, until you realize that it can only exist because it's held up by all the people paying the costs of the "worse" way.
As a thought experiment: Think of how much different our larger society could be if there was some sort of alien galactic society that handled those kinds of problems for us.
I think people who worship competition take for granted the fundamental importance of cooperation, indeed to what degree cooperation handles many of the big problems for them.
My criticism is that it doesn't scale and they're freeloaders. And you can bet if enough people started dodging taxes like this, the IRS would be on the case. But it's small scale so they get away with it.
I don't think they're doing something morally wrong, to be clear. Just that it can't scale.
Other farms pay tax fully, and my criticism doesn't apply.
There was a time, for that matter, where most of the U.S. economy was agrarian. The world still worked. There were fewer government services, to be sure- but if most people are members of semi-self-sufficient communities, fewer services would be needed.
Eating food grown and prepared by other people in a community of 70+ people, in exchange for your labor in other areas, and paying no tax on any of it.... tax dodge.
How many people does it have to be, in your opinion, before it's a tax dodge?
However, East Wind is incorporated as a 501(d) organization, which is what monasteries use. For more info on 501(d) orgs: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-025-023
I can't find anything specific, but I think that since they share their income and produce as a collective, they're only liable for taxes on their share of the income that the collective produces. Monks don't have to pay taxes on the value they get from the monastery vegetable garden.
Tax avoidance is a time-honored American tradition. This is one way to do so. It sounds like they've done their legal homework if they've managed to survive 30 years without IRS trouble.