Well maintained farm structures
Perhaps it is barn envy. This farm has never had enough barns or sheds for the equipment, animals, forage, and tools to meet our needs, despite our ongoing efforts. Seventeen years of building hay sheds, equipment sheds, chicken coops, and well houses has provided me with a fair sense of the work, skill, material resources, and neighborly assistance needed to construct those larger hay barns that dot our landscape.
So I feel a particular sadness watching old barns fall into disuse or being torn down before their time, the wood destined to deck a second home on the lake or, more often, simply bulldozed and burned.
This large barn may have been ignored too long
Often this tear-down is done by new owners seeking the “country life.” The country life is a consumer choice, bought and sold. It’s quite distinct from the agrarian life, which is a life of work and provision. In the past five years, we have watched two different neighbors tear down perfectly good barns and burn the lumber. One neighbor bulldozed a two-story hay and tobacco barn and replaced it with a poorly constructed lean-to for lawnmowers and weedeaters and leaf blowers. The other leveled a barn built of chestnut and oak so he could have more room to practice his golf swings.
A recent conversation with an extension agent about fencing revealed a similar pattern. According to his statistics, more than 50 percent of fencing in our county has been torn out in the past 20 years.
This hay barn was overgrown and falling down three years ago. They replaced the rotting wood and support beams and extended the usefulness for another generation.
The destruction of an infrastructure that is often still perfectly suited for the continued productive use of these East Tennessee valley farms is concrete evidence of the demise of a formerly vibrant community of neighbors and family that worked together. From the tobacco barn and smokehouse to the chicken coop and milking parlor, all helped to explain who went before and what worked on this land.
Although not necessarily wed to our predecessors’ choices, we’d be wise to not wholly ignore them either by tearing down the evidence of their accomplishments. That evidence is a blueprint linking the past to a possible future. Because far deeper than the grain in the wood is the pattern to sustain life and community.
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Reading this weekend: Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hoschschild. An interesting new sociology of the American right that focuses on my home town of Lake Charles and Calcasieu Parish.
A most fitting book to read, then.
The author’s name is Hochschild (sans an s), meaning ‘high shield’. There exists an old expression where that name comes from, ‘to lift someone onto the shield’, which happened to denote that someone had been elected as the new leader.
Like, say, Vitalstatistix.
It is a nice companion to Hillbilly Elegy. Although, since it is about my people, it is a bit more interesting. And, thanks for the history on the name. How are the late summer crops faring? We haven’t had rain in thirty days. So nothing is faring here in Tennessee.
Well, we’ve had a crappy summer, and just as I was preparing to rip things out early to start preparing the new bed configuration for next season, the weather OF COURSE turned extremely hot and sunny, with everything suddenly growing splendidly.
Nb: I never have to water my crops, which is why this kind of weather is more than welcome. And my area is probably going to get wetter in the High Altithermal, so the things I’m worrying about are planting for optimum ventilation, mildew etc.
I know, right! We are getting rain in the wrong seasons. I’m diversifying everything on the farm in the hopes something sticks.
The other leveled a barn built of chestnut and oak so he could have more room to practice his golf swings.
All I can offer to that is “OUCH”. One might hope his golf swing will soon be most impressive. But even then I still wonder what sort of transferable skill a sweet swing brings to an agrarian mode of living. Your pitting of “country life” vs. “agrarian life” sets off this dichotomy nicely.
I wouldn’t bet on any improvement, Clem.
Up north in dairy country the concern is what is happening to silos. Those big blue metal silos are way over $150,000 to buy and install. Just to tear one down costs $10,000. Tearing down the old concrete silos and putting up the metal ones was all the rage until the price of milk got so low they started on the plastic. For the last 15 years the service areas of dairy farms have sprouted plastic. The cheaper way to go is big white sheets of plastic covered with used tires to hold them down. You pay more for the giant white worms and the equipment to fill them, but then, they’re cheaper than a new silo. I suppose a careful, mindful dairyman might roll back the plastic sheet and reuse it the following fall, but the worm bags are toast once you start to use them. All of this plastic (and it’s a lot!) gets landfilled, unless the farmer is a real jerk and burns it instead (and they do).
Luddene,
Thanks for the comment and thoughts. You are pretty spot on about the way the next generation of “improvements” is really just a trap for debt.
Cheers,
Brian