Farmer Focus: Shed demolition suits us and city folks
Daniel Mushrush © Kandace Griffin We are busy tearing down a few old barns. Unsurprisingly, a few people have reacted with disappointment.
It has turned out to be a teachable moment for my children, and we have shared some observations with them.
Firstly, nostalgia can be dangerous, especially in agriculture. Those barns don’t have feelings any more than Grandpa’s hammer.
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To keep doing maintenance on them – let alone pay property taxes – simply so they can exist is backwards and bad business practice. Our operation is not only a real business, but a forward-looking one.
Secondly, nostalgia is applied unevenly. We have been able to capitalise on this wistfulness for one of the barns as it has a bunch of milk stanchions in the basement made of hand-hewn walnut beams.
These beams are about 125 years old and suit the new “farmhouse chic” trend in the cities.
I sold the barn to an interior design company in Kansas City to disassemble it for accent walls, tables and fireplace mantles.
The grain elevator built in the 1960s is too new and “sterile” and is therefore scrap metal.
The people who used those barns would think our nostalgia is crazy. As I write this it is -10C, there is tremendous wind and about an inch of ice has accumulated.
I bet the guys milking four cows in the basement of that barn felt as if they were beating their brains in on those old beams.
The crane operator asked me if I knew the distributor on the grain elevator was held together by duct tape. “Hell, yes, I did!” I said. I’m the one who put it there and got stung by hornets for my trouble.
If any of you run into my sister over in the UK, ask her about cleaning out the grain pit with old coffee cans. It may be one of the reasons she left the country.
I don’t want our children to disregard our roots, but I would rather they focus their sentiment on the people who got them there, rather than the objects.
One positive is that it has allowed us to talk about their great-granddad, whom we lost five years ago – those are memories worth sharing.