Once Upon A Barn

The first digital pictures we have in our farm "archive" come from 2008, when Practical Farmers of Iowa sponsored a field day on our farm.  Sally Worley, now the Executive Director of PFI, brought the camera along to capture the event as it unfolded.  For whatever reason, I decided to scroll though the pictures taken on that day once again - and I was struck by how different things are now at the Genuine Faux Farm.

Perhaps the most stunning difference was the mostly functional, very large, barn on the premises. 

The barn was home to our laying flock and our turkey flock.  The hens had a nice pasture that was accessed from the back (East) of the barn.  The field was surrounded (mostly) by cattle panels that we added chicken wire to, in hopes of containing the birds and excluding the predators.

Let's just say that the idea was fine in principle and periodically troublesome in practice.

We lost chickens to mink and raccoon.  We even lost turkeys to a raccoon that we unfortunately and inadvertently locked IN with the turkeys one fateful day.  We were forever (it seems) trying to patch up holes in the fence, in the rooms we created for the birds to sleep securely at night, and in our jeans (after we caught them on the fence).

These were the days when we were always listening for alarm calls from our poultry flocks.  It seemed like each of the days in June and July had at least one such instance.  Of course, the issues did not stop once the sun went down as I can recall several instances where we found ourselves in the barn, at night, trying to do one more patch or otherwise doing what we could to protect the birds.

There are stories we can tell.  And we've told some of them.  But the problem is that so many of them have melted together into one blobby mess.  That's what happens when exhausted people go from one seeming catastrophe to another.

Now, was it really all that bad?

Well, truthfully?  Yes and no.

The year 2008 was only the fourth full season of production at the Genuine Faux Farm.  We had done a little bit during a fifth year, but it wasn't quite the formal farm business that it became until the second year.  We were still learning how to cope with all of the things that simply "happen" on a small-scale, diversified farm.  And, to top things off, neither of us had grown up on a farm.  So we didn't even have that to fall back on.

But, here we are in 2022.  We're still at the farm.  And the barn isn't... unless you count the rubble that lies in its place.  We have a flock of turkeys and a couple of hen flocks.  We just sent a flock of broiler chickens to the park too.  

Something must have gone right between then and now.  Even though the remains of the old barn, which once sat prominently in the center of it all, now do little to contribute to the farm's goals.  

The barn is actually something I find that I miss at times.  And at other moments, I recall how impossible it was going to be to restore the barn to its full function given the state we received it in.  The roof was in dire need of repair - and we couldn't afford to do it.  And, you all know the old saying that once a roof for a farm's outbuilding goes - so goes the building.

Well, it has gone, and one day we'll do the cleanup and make decisions on what will happen in that spot next.  Until then, I'll walk by the pile of old lumber and remember that we were often uncertain about what were were doing, even while we were actually doing pretty well.

Then I'll remember that today isn't all that different from that day.

Somehow, I find that comforting.