Reuse
We have an old barn. It was there when we bought the farm, decent size, big enough to drive a tractor down the middle pulling a hay wagon behind. Early on we used the barn every year to store some hay but only when we could find a local to cut and bale our hay for us since the barn came with the property, but equipment did not.
The barn is not pretty. And it isn’t old. Built in the 1970’s most likely by local jake legs, it was in a state of possible collapse a few years into owning this farm. Lots of blood, sweat, and sore backs went into shoring it up along with replacing major structural supports. It must have worked since the barn is still standing, has a few horse stalls, stores some equipment, and serves as a springtime nursery for the Berkshire pigs.
But mostly that barn stored tobacco for curing. Yes, this farm was a tobacco farm for a number of years but that ended when the Federal tobacco program ended. Certainly good riddance was bid to that phase of farm history. Tobacco was a filthy land and people destroying crop, but it was a cash crop with a ready market. Now what?
Reuse.
The patches where tobacco was grown were returned to hayfields. And we always grew a vegetable garden except those few years when babies needed tending. The babies grew up and joined 4-H and we learned to raise meat chickens and keep laying hens and Berkshire pigs were added to the menagerie. Meat chickens in their chicken tractors now run through those hayfields in summer. And the land heals, and we help it heal and we learn that the soil, good soil, fertile soil grows incredible vegetables. And we learn that good soil grows healthy crops and that when we get out of the way, the pests are prey for predators and man-made stuff does not make sense to use anymore, if it ever did make any sense to use poison to keep things alive.
So what good is that old barn? Reuse…that barn is where the organic garlic goes for curing in late summer. An added bonus for the 2021 garden season is a decent crop of onions, and they too are curing in that jake leg barn.
