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Notes from the farm
I’m spending the week in Maryland on my father-in-law's two hundred year old family farm. We call him Pop. He's 92.
Pop has two daughters, twins. One is my wife Jane, who looks nothing like her sister, Judi. Nonetheless, they cut are from the same cloth. Judi lives in one of three apartments on the farm. She manages things. Pop lives in the main house by himself.
The farm is a magnificent place. Land well conserved, woods well managed, stewardship all around by a man universally admired. The holdings consist of 170 acres of pasture and fields, with patches of forest, and two ponds. Electric fences everywhere. Fields growing corn and hay, a smattering of cows, a well-maintained barn, a granary, a workshop, a main house, five rental units, one of which is a converted milk house. Another of the rental units is a small two story house with a sign on the front wall: Yellow House, Est, 1775.
Once a working dairy farm, Pop took the land in new directions. He started a lime and fertilizer business and became the go-to guy for supplying farmers in this region. He preserved and conserved his land. He is a good man.
Whatever fantasies you might have about idyllic farm life, you can forget about right now. Just keeping up maintenance on the dozen buildings here is a full time job.
Today Pop is mostly out of the lime business. He generates income by renting things. Fields to neighboring farmers for grazing or growing. Space in the barn for car storage. Some renters pay a fair price, some trade for helping out around the farm. And some skip town, months behind on their payments. Pop won’t throw them out.
The land is neighbored by Amish farms, that seem to do pretty well from what I can see. It helps that they have the slave labor of large families built into their business models.
Most of our work this week involves sorting through Pop’s basement, plus a few other odd jobs. The basement is a combination hardware store, museum, library, reliquary, convenience store, gun shop, filled beyond the brim with ninety years of stuff stacked and sorted in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. Don’t forget the wiring. My favorite find on Tuesday was a tattoo magazine. Today turned up a very sweet Bakelite clock, mint condition.
Yesterday a realtor visited. Pop is thinking about selling the farm.
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A view of the main house from the lane
The smokehouse sits across the lane from the yellow house
Buy the farm James....work something out...
We have a small farm....I bought it from my Dad when he was considering selling. They aren't making any more land. Lease it to someone or share crop it...but don't let it go. One of these days it will be the place where your family can sustain itself when everything else goes belly-up. (I'm a pessimist...read The Long Emergency by Kunstler...and then read his novel "Made by Hand.")
Stan Bozarth
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." Frederic Bastiat
I am in complete and total agreement with Stan
Buy the farm. Then I want your next post to be, "How I bought the farm and lived to tell the tale."
Loved reading the above. I'm only half joking about the blog post title.
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Currently lacking a witty signature.
If you get a chance,
post some pics, James.
Maintaining even a small farm is a lot of work. I used to spend my Summers in Paris, Arkansas, on my Uncle's farm. He had just enough chickens and pigs to keep you fed and busy. He also had about fifty head of cattle and a bull named Buddy. Buddy was a "player", which meant he was constantly probing the fence for weaknesses so he could go out and get some strange.
The funny things is, if you made eye contact with Buddy, he would do whatever you told him to. So whenever he was escaping (or trying to), he would studiously avoid eye contact, like it wasn't a crime until he admitted it was a a crime or something. So you had to sneak/run around to get in front of him to make him look at you. ;)
I love it when you get to step back in time
of course things where not as good/bad as you remember but history really sinks in better than reading about it in a book. Having helped close up six different homesteads I know what fun the discoveries can be but I had to look up "reliquary", that's a new one on me.
Imagine, that Yellow House was there to see our country born. That just brings tears to my eyes. Please do post pictures.
Progressive Democrats of North Carolina
I was also going to say to keep the farm in the family
but I recognize that there might be a fairly significant monetary incentive to be dealt with ...
-b
There cannot fail to be more kinds of things, as nature grows further disclosed. - Sir Francis Bacon
That first picture is an Amish farmer
who rents 20 acres on the north side of the farm.
Unless someone is renting the smokehouse
you could make a real serious amont of money by hanging some hams, some good large link sausages and Maryland Smoked Fish.
I personally will apply for the Smokehouse Overseer and Quality Control person to make sure this venture gets off the ground without any issues.
Purchase the farm, James. It would be interesting, and which of us at our ages couldn't use something interesting to be invovled with to help us forget about our ages.
;-)
North Carolina. Turning the South Blue!
Those Were the Days...
I used to work on my uncle's farm near Sparta during my teenage summer years. Work started at 4am and wrapped up around 8-9pm. There day started at the dairy, then alternated between hay, tobacco, and corn, then ended with the dairy again.
As James's post relates and others have mentioned, even a small farm is a huge operation. Multiple fields, barns, animals, raw materials, trucks, tractors, and sundry spare parts everywhere.
A farmer does so much more than the actual farm labor. He (or she) is also a vet, a mechanic, a handyman, a business man, and an accountant, among others.
Hopefully James's story turns out better than mine. The only thing left of my uncle's farm is the house and an old,rickety open barn filled with the junk that couldn't be sold. The money, if there ever was any, is all gone now. All those years of work and all that's left is a couple of elderly folks in a run down house.
"You win the election, you run the country." Salman Rushdie
I don't know if anybody's
listened to it, but NPR has been airing a series on farming in the last few days. They said a hundred years ago, 1 in 4 Americans were somehow involved in farming. Now it's 1 out of every 100.
We've lost something there that may (partly) explain our out-of-control consumerism and disconnect with our environment.
Which shore James?
East or West? There's no life west of the Chesapeake Bay you know. That's what the folks say. If it's on the eastern shore you should stop by and see mom and pop when you buy that place. The pics are makin me miss home. Of course it's harder to miss when I remember that it's probably about 95 degrees with 110% humidity right about now. :D
My grampa was a dairy farmer back there too. Maybe we're related!
My aunt and several cousins live on the Eastern Shore
on a farm. I love that place, and spent many happy summers wandering the fields and woods. My cousin took it over when his parents were too old and sick to keep it up. He is about to retire, and his son, who is 25, is ready to step in as "head farmer".
We're having a family reunion there in the fall. I can't wait!
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My darling girl, when will you understand that 'normal' is not necessarily a virtue. It rather denotes a lack of courage. Alice Hoffman