Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

February 2006

This Old Barn

Dear Friends,

Not every old building, shanty and shed is worth saving. We have a few rugged little buildings on our place that have outlived their usefulness and are costly to repair, so they probably need to go.

Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer and author who makes a living with his family by direct marketing home-raised pork, beef, rabbit, chicken and eggs from his pastured based spread, believes in temporary buildings. He doesn’t like the idea that every old barn should be saved at all cost.

Salatin prefers inexpensive homebuilt greenhouses and metal sheds that can be used for a variety of purposes like hay storage, winter shelter for hogs and sheltering his farm machinery.

While I agree with Salatin about buildings needing to carry their own weight around the place, I also think many of our historic buildings on the farm and in rural communities are well worth the time and effort to preserve.

Cedar County has so many beautiful, historic and unique churches. I like to think that they will be standing long after my own children are grown, to be worshipped in and enjoyed for generations to come. Some of the original brick structures in many small towns around are of special value because of unique architecture and because of the town founders who built them.

We don’t have the hallowed structures here on the Great Plains that you see on the East Coast – those buildings like Independence Hall, the Capitol and Mount Vernon. We just haven’t been settled so long, so what is historic here is a little newer.

But that doesn’t mean that certain structures aren’t worth saving, even if they take on new purpose in the process. Our old barn was built by my grandfather in 1916, right after he and my grandmother were married and moved onto the place. Over the years, the barn hosted lofts full of hay and draft horses on the ground level.

In those days, a couple of times a year, the barn hosted barn dances for the neighborhood, important gatherings to lift the spirits during the dark days of Depression and drought in the 1930’s. I’m told that during these affairs, ornery kids would often lift fairly light Model T Fords parked in the horse stalls and turn them sideways, so the owners would have a difficult time leaving when they wanted to.

Later on, the barn was home for milk cows and milking stanchions that still stand. Still later, the back barn was converted for use as a hog barn for feeder pigs.

Now the barn is sporting a new metal roof and paintjob and is used as a working facility for our cows and calves and it serves as a warehouse for our sunflower seed sales. The same old building, with relatively minor adjustments, is just as useful as it was in the old days when it was newly built.

While that doesn’t follow the detail of Salatin’s theory of farm structures, it certainly does keep within the spirit of his beliefs in keeping costs down and multiple uses intact. There is also that little thing called "heritage" that I find increasingly important, now that my kids are asking questions about when their Daddy and their Grandpa were young, living on this same farmstead.