Dan, Eric, Maggie and I squeezed into Dan’s tiny red pickup. A fine snow began to fall, mixing with the earthy browns and grays of the surrounding hills. The four of us pulled out of the driveway; we were on our way to go pick up old hay from a rapidly deteriorating barn a mile down the road.
This is the basement through that dark doorway above. Most of the supporting beams are broken. The whole thing is held together by the hay stuffed inside the barn.
Not too long ago, the barn was beautiful and in great shape—made of stout hickory beams held together with wooden pegs and sheltered by a thick, corrugated metal roof. This barn was built around 1910, and in a similar manner to all the barns in the area, including Dan’s. It sits on roughly 220 acres of unused land. According to Dan, the property was owned by an elderly farmer. He had 4 children—all of which moved away from the country and became CEO’s in different cities. When the farmer died, he parceled the land out evenly to his kids. Unfortunately, they couldn’t work it out between themselves to either sell the property or find a way to care for it, so now the house, barn, and various outlying structures sit, gradually succumbing to nature. To make matters worse, inside the barn was an estimated 20,000 bales of fresh-cut hay. At 3-4 dollars per bale, they would’ve sold for up to $80,000! Instead, they began to rot. Each wind storm blows off another set of roof panels, exposing the massive mountain of stale hay to moisture.
In certain areas where the roof of the barn is intact there are still crisp bales to be found. We use them on the farm as bedding for the pigs and for mulching in between rows of crops.
Walking around the old barn is a harrowing experience. In many places, only a layer or two of interlocked bales separate you from a nasty fall onto the lowest level of the barn. One side of the barn offers a nice view of the countryside through a gaping hole in the siding. The juxtaposition of slanting, splintered wood silhouetted against the snow-dusted rolling hillocks was striking. Once we’d filled up the bed of the pickup truck, we piled in once more and made our way back to the farm. Unfortunately, the state of this particular barn is not at all unlike many farms in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and in the United States.
The Pig Year 