Washingtonians

[Chicken Rustler]

Quote:
Toni lives somewhere in Bonney Lake I wll see what we can do.

She just text me again she is upset because her "babies" (ducks) are out in the cold wind and rain and she is at work till 8:30 tonight.
Help would be great I know she would really appreciate.

 

[AriLovesChickens]

I just spent about an hour and a half outside, raking and moving leaves. I'm not sure which is more crazy: that I'm raking leaves in the rain (and getting soaked), or that I'm doing it solely to put them in my chicken coop/run.

 

[hallerlake]

Quote:
If you're crazy, so am I.

 

[justbugged]

Quote:
I guess I pictured it all wrong but I imagined since you raised cattle that you lived on the family farm. Thought you've talked about the place being in the family. Family farms in my mind have several barns and out buildings especially when they've been around awhile. Are you pretty much a house on bare land? Surprised about your struggles with animal housing issues, but there I go thinking again!

Aren't you just the sweetest old fashioned romantic? Barns don't last long in this climate, for one important thing, but for another: Stumpfarmer. It wasn't chosen arbitrarily or to be cute.

The original barn here went down in the Columbus Day storm; we used the huge old dairy barn belonging to the neighbor to store hay until 1991, and I have what is supposed to be a cow/calf infirmary barn that was built in 1987 except it's stacked full of my husband's family stuff which was supposed to be sold at a garage sale until he freaked out and refused to put any of it out for sale. This was never a dairy farm, anyway. Oh, yeah, and some time about 1956 Dad's aunt got disgusted by the "dirty" (unpainted, typical wet cedar black in winter) pig pens, chicken houses, stable, grainery and water tower and burned them all down. All that's left that's old is a tiny ice-house and an old logging cabin built on skids. The latter would be demolished, should have been demolished decades ago, but nobody's got the kind of time to spare that would take to do properly and not leave hazards for the cattle.

My sister has a tiny cow shed: there have been two pole barns burned down at her place, one of them the same day the Nuclear Winter article was published in Parade Magazine (about 28 years ago) with 100 tons of the best hay we ever put up in it, the other less than a year after it was built, both victims of young boys who were "just playing" and both uncompensated by insurance.

My BIL's place has the most buildings, although the biggest one was built astraddle the line between his father's and grandfather's land and 2/3 of it is now in a subdivision. He's got the pigs, the beef feeders, the hay mostly stored under tarps, and a couple of other random shops and sheds.

The only people I know who have a lot of good barns are ones who bought remote dairies that were sold under the Whole Herd Buy Out and had enough money to keep roofs on them.

A couple hundred cattle, an unknown fluctuating number of pigs, two people working full time, me not much able to work at all anymore, and one thirteen-year-old boy. No family money, no government programs that help us beyond open spaces taxation, and a state of constant low-level anxiety with frequent outbreaks of panic that we won't be able to do it this time.

Welcome to our nightmare. Isn't it fun?

This helped me clarify more about the area that you are trying to work with. I must say that I was wondering about the outbuildings that are normally attached to large farms. I had been thinking that maybe some of the other family had kept them on their property. Now I know that you are all in the same boat.

 

[justbugged]

Well my DH is missing, and the phones don't work.

 

[Chicken Rustler]

Quote:
MISSING ??? as in serious or as in you are not sure where he is ???

 

[Cowgirlgrace]

Quote:
MISSING ??? as in serious or as in you are not sure where he is ???

Mine goes 'missing' a lot.

 

[Stumpfarmer]

Quote:
Farms that get well maintained are almost always farms with multiple people working in jobs that have health benefits, or ones where there's a crop which is supported by some kind of price controls, or where there's a close relationship between maintenance and ability to keep farming (dairies and egg and fryer factories). Or hobby farms of one sort or the other. Beautiful wooden barns fall down and get replaced with steel frame sheds or with long piles of round bales under big tarps: there's not the money in raising most crops anymore to put out the time and money good buildings take.

We were not farming this parcel when the barn came down (when I was ten), beyond feeding up a dozen or so Holstein replacement heifers: that was when Dad was working as a union carpenter. There was no well here then anyway, we had to haul water or use the neighbor's trough. When we lost use of the old dairy barn Dad was already dead, we switched to putting all our hay at the BIL's family place, and there was nobody to push through a replacement anyway.

This isn't a sob story, I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm mostly pointing out a situation which gets repeated on small farms all over western Washington and Oregon. I know other beef people who have lost all their barns to floods along the Chehalis, replaced them with a loafing shed and piles of tarp-covered round bales, and kept farming, and I know people who have lost everything they owned to the real-estate developers because they got hung up on keeping buildings, including homestead houses that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs and reroofing and rewiring and replumbing, drip drip drip wears away the stone. I have friends who have half a million dollars in cash flow on Farmer's Market operations who live in travel trailers parked inside of steel shop buildings.

It depends on priorities and budget; if your priorities are to keep farming and your budget is such that you have to let barns fall down or you pull them down and sell the barn wood to people who make stuff for eBay, well, you do that. It's got no moral dimension beyond the commitment to a single piece of land or a group of neighbors or a way of life.

I think it's better than selling out and losing one of the few open places to more boring pale-grey houses with big complicated roofs and not enough yard too grow a vegetable garden. I know it's better than the great emptiness on both sides of I-90 in Lincoln County Washington, where all the farmsites have been replaced by more wheat, the few yard lights left shining over equipment sheds with no residences nearer them than a mile in any direction. The first time we took my daughter to Missoula I was shocked at the difference everywhere east of Moses Lake, houses which were landmarks to me when I was at WSU gone completely, farmsteads of house and barn and shop and sheds and windbreak replaced with ploughed ground.

We've been here since before 1900. We are still here now. These are the buildings we have right now- things may change. They've changed before, they will change again.

 

[Stumpfarmer]

Quote:
Aren't you just the sweetest old fashioned romantic? Barns don't last long in this climate, for one important thing, but for another: Stumpfarmer. It wasn't chosen arbitrarily or to be cute.

The original barn here went down in the Columbus Day storm; we used the huge old dairy barn belonging to the neighbor to store hay until 1991, and I have what is supposed to be a cow/calf infirmary barn that was built in 1987 except it's stacked full of my husband's family stuff which was supposed to be sold at a garage sale until he freaked out and refused to put any of it out for sale. This was never a dairy farm, anyway. Oh, yeah, and some time about 1956 Dad's aunt got disgusted by the "dirty" (unpainted, typical wet cedar black in winter) pig pens, chicken houses, stable, grainery and water tower and burned them all down. All that's left that's old is a tiny ice-house and an old logging cabin built on skids. The latter would be demolished, should have been demolished decades ago, but nobody's got the kind of time to spare that would take to do properly and not leave hazards for the cattle.

My sister has a tiny cow shed: there have been two pole barns burned down at her place, one of them the same day the Nuclear Winter article was published in Parade Magazine (about 28 years ago) with 100 tons of the best hay we ever put up in it, the other less than a year after it was built, both victims of young boys who were "just playing" and both uncompensated by insurance.

My BIL's place has the most buildings, although the biggest one was built astraddle the line between his father's and grandfather's land and 2/3 of it is now in a subdivision. He's got the pigs, the beef feeders, the hay mostly stored under tarps, and a couple of other random shops and sheds.

The only people I know who have a lot of good barns are ones who bought remote dairies that were sold under the Whole Herd Buy Out and had enough money to keep roofs on them.

A couple hundred cattle, an unknown fluctuating number of pigs, two people working full time, me not much able to work at all anymore, and one thirteen-year-old boy. No family money, no government programs that help us beyond open spaces taxation, and a state of constant low-level anxiety with frequent outbreaks of panic that we won't be able to do it this time.

Welcome to our nightmare. Isn't it fun?

This helped me clarify more about the area that you are trying to work with. I must say that I was wondering about the outbuildings that are normally attached to large farms. I had been thinking that maybe some of the other family had kept them on their property. Now I know that you are all in the same boat.

Well, the BIL's place has the best set-up, but it's also two miles from here, and his. My place has a lot of advantages- best drainage, best winter pasture, and a lot of wind protection- but when it comes to buildings I've got what I can build and keep my husband from jamming foll of stuff.

 

[Stumpfarmer]

(Sitting here freaking out because my DS is stuck at Easton because of Avalanche Control; wish they'd just decided to have a nice turkey dinner where they are, poor kids).

(Also: trying to warm up enough to do some housework: today has been a slog).