What happened to small family farms when industry left them behind: Column
In one generation, an American institution has become obsolete. The small farm has disappeared to the point of extinction. We view those remaining as quaint but not practical – throwbacks to simpler times.
One by one, aging homesteads fall down or are sold, subdivided, reconstituted as suburbs. Houses go up, bought by people who have never experienced, nor can they imagine, the hardship of previous lives on this land: clearing trees with an ax, pulling stumps using oxen, milking cows pulling teats, the old way.
I know an old farmstead. It stands battered, not broken. If you want, we can take a walk there.
The farm has the look of a place left for good at least four or five decades ago. A man got up one morning, milked his last cow, chopped his last load of corn and moved out, to a factory job in the city. Changes since then have been wrought by the forces of nature.
Slanted sun rays show the age of the shakes on the side of the two-story house. Slouched and weary, the dwelling has long been abandoned. Paint peels off the front porch in strips.
A once-tended orchard grows wilder each summer. No one will pick this year’s crop of sour apples. Deer emerge nightly to see if a stray one has fallen.
Tops of locust posts protrude above tangles of brush, delineating the boundaries of a long-abandoned pasture. Once grazed by cows, the field now nurtures blackberry brambles, wildflowers and red maple saplings.
Cottontail rabbits have moved in, feeling safe in their berry cane fortress. Honeybees gorge on goldenrod nectar. Deer have browsed every red maple bud.
An overgrown hedgerow harbors pin cherry trees. The trees have grown old, serving now as support for a mass of grape vines. Bluish-black grapes hang in dense, lustrous clusters. Creatures will find them: songbird, grouse, turkey, rabbit, skunk, fox, opossum, squirrel, raccoon.
The barn appears ready to fall with the next gentle breeze. Wide, weathered boards have warped and pulled away from the hand-hewn support beams that bind them. Barn swallows still find the crumbling structure attractive. Their mud nests sit atop massive beams in the old milking parlor.
In the barn’s dark hay mow, rotting harnesses lie in a corner. Rusty pitch forks languish in semi-darkness, abandoned to an age in which small farmers can’t find a place.
Making the most of this old homestead now are the wild things that find it appealing. As time buries buildings and turns cornfields to forest, they will move in, move out, carry on.
Future visitors here will record what I have: the slow disappearance of signs that a family toiled on this lonely side hill.
Someday a new house may stand where the farmhouse decays. A neighborhood may spring up where brambles hide cottontail rabbits. Change will come in some form to this old farm, but it will never be what it once was.
This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: What remains of NY small farms? A trip up the hill offers a glimpse
