20 Years Tomorrow, Kinda Bummed.

big a

Member
Be 20 years tomorrow my dad sold out. After 35 years raising cattle and hogs, working day and night, and finally an off farm job, he finally realized it just wasn't going to work. Sold machinery, land, and in the end, pretty well walked away with the shirt on his back.
Went back home with him yesterday to pick up a parts tractor, and detoured around by the old place. Dad always took pride in having having everything neat and squared away. Present owner has let everything go beyond belief. I could see it hit dad hard, but it did me too, as if to say nothing he did there was ever worthwhile.
Also realized there isn't an old friend or neighbor left alive within about 5 miles of there. Places all abandoned, or bulldozed flat in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Left the area thoroughly disgusted with the way things are today, and wishing I could bring it back somehow.
Drank like no tomorrow for about 6-7 years after we got out, then came to the realization that it was maybe for the best. Dad would have worked himself to death, and maybe life would have taken a different path for me, not meeting my wife, and having the 2 great boys, and the good life we have together.
Dad and I looked around for about an hour, and I grabbed the RH armrest I broke off our old 756 IH. Still hanging on the wall in the machine shed where I left it. Started thinking about it, and the place brings back almost as many bad memories as good.

Not really sure why I'm posting this, but I know some here will understand.
 
If it's any consolation,I've lived right here in the same house all my life and there isn't an old neighbor left within 5 miles. Places run down,built houses over or bulldozed. You can't go home again even if you never left.
 
As My Grandfather..

" Everyone leaves their mark in this world
Son, Make sure yours is a Good Mark"
 
I am watching that very thing happen to my home place too, big a. The farm never was all that nice a place to start with, but look at it now all grown up, fields going to weeds, no hay made last summer, buildings falling in...it's a shame. Seems like things have to go down the toilet before new life can come in and start again. Kinda like the inner citys I guess.
 
Can't imagine going through that. So so many people/families have tried so hard and lost the battle.
When Dad passed, mother made sure the multi-generational farm went to drunk baby brother. Now she and he are on what's left- about an acre and half with a trailer on it.
I had just gotten started on my own, so with Dad gone, it was very difficult for years, but we managed. It was a long time before I could drive by the home place without strong emotions.
Kids are long gone, but if there's a grandchild interested, then at least there's a chance to continue.
 
Randy you are so right! Try your best to keep things as you would like them to be but.... folks get old, and die off, sell out, new folks come, and soon home is not what you knew it to be. Change is always for good, but not always for better. Bruce
 
I know exactly what you mean. We moved away 40 years
ago last August. Was talking to Mom about it the
other day and we all thought it was temporary.
Ron
 
Big A: Farming is a fatal bug that has bitten many of us. There is no fun in it if your farming at a loss. Many feel like they "failed" and are ashamed or embarrassed by no longer farming. That is just emotions.

I bet that your Dad felt relief from the long hours and no money. We tend to remember the good and forget the bad.

I hope that my sons being involved in farming is not a mistake. The farm picture is changing rapidly and none of us know where it will fall out but there will be change.

If I had to try to start over today it would not happen. The profit margins are too small for the return on investment. You pretty much have to be born into a farm or marry it. Th capitol needs are just too great for a person to start from scratch anymore.

Your Father's "mark" on this world is YOU not some piece of land somewhere.
 
Big A, I know the sentiment you're talking about.
About 20-25 years ago my Grand dad retired from
the farm, built the house I'm in now and gave the
farm to my uncle in exchange for building this
house for him. My uncle went behind everyone's
back in 1998 and sold the farm with 127 acres
without letting anyone in the family know. I had
offered to buy it about four months earlier for
more money and was refused. The current owner is
an ignorant hateful man who has let the place
degrade to where it's not worth anything now. He
took the cattle stanchions out and the barn has
many pieces of roofing and siding blown off with
no repairs at all. I bought this house four years
ago after my granddad passed away. It's on a four
acre piece on the corner of the old farm and I
have to look at the mess over there everyday. It
angers me sometimes but mostly it just breaks my
heart to see it. I wish I could somehow buy it
back and rebuild it to what it was when I used to
spend all my weekends and summers working the farm
with my Grampy . I learned what little I know from
him and learned to drive his old H and my Great
Uncles Super C. It was hard work but it gave me a
sense of respect for what work really was.
 
I also had to sell almost everything in 94.I was 29 and just seemed to be going backwards.Was working near old farm in oct new owners have fixed up house and barn.Our farm was 250 acres and was cut in half by marcy south 345 kv powerline in1988. Now Andy Cummo wants to put another line next to it. My parents grave markers are there.thanks Greg
 
Dad struggled with it for years His quitting farming. Dad was a salesman he made a good living doing construction work with his farm trucks and equipment. He rarely looked at work He did not get. I always told Him that he was so use to working for nothing that anything He made was profit.
Ron
 
When I was in jr high I realized the farm where I grew up and worked each day would end up going to step uncles and step aunts. It was upsetting. My side ended up with a quarter of ground but ended up selling. The step uncle is farming it and has rented the house to a neighbor's illegal migrant workers. The place has just run into the ground. The most I can do now is look at it on Google Earth.

I have worked and clawed to buy my own farm. It has about killed me and taken years off of my life. I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm just as happy each day as I was in the field as a teenager.

Local legislator was at the neighbors. They were talking about the future of farming. The neighbor told her to ask me about getting started and the price it pays. The legislator went on about how many loan programs there are to help farmers get into the profession. I explained to her that we all watched what happened in the 80's (or young kids' parents did). Most of us vowed to make it and not let that happen to us. Sure, my pickup has a payment but the machinery is all mine. I will succeed. Someday the grand kids of the folks that started this dairy will drive by. I want them to be as proud as I am.
 
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”
¯ Henry David Thoreau,
 
You are right about no fun losing money farming, or any other enterprise for that matter, but a person can still get started on their own in agriculture but it takes a little ingenuity and they have to produce what the area they live in will sustain or else move to another area. Both of my sons have been able to buy and pay for land in the last 10 years, one with pecan orchard and cattle and the other with cattle and hay and custom work, they do both work off the farm but one day they may not have to if they so choose. Where we live if you have grass you can make money with a cow herd, it is a different dynamic than trying to feed bought in cattle and rents and land prices are much less than the mid-west. There are still many places in the US where a man can go and make it happen if he is willing to make a change, looking back on life I am glad I was born and raised in an area where it was root hog or die.
 
I drive past place my Grandfather built with his own hands, The driveway he drove in coming home from work is all grass now. A couple out buildings are falling down. New owners did the one thing I would have done if I got it, they added on to the small kitchen.
 
Dad sold the home place farm in about 58. and moved about a mile down the road, where he bought another smaller place, and just raised oat hay. No one was living at the home place since it was sold. One night someone came and torched all the buildings. the house I lived in, both grand mothers houses, barn, shop, and Mexican Joe's little shack. I go past the place all the time, and just think of the old days growing up. I think the person who lit the buildings was the person who bought the place. Will never know. It is all houses now. Stan
 
Yea, I know how you feel. My grandparents never owned a farm of there own, but always sharecropped with someone. The last farm they were on was from 1955 to 1970. My greatest memories of kid were the first 7 year of my life and the last 7 they were on that old place. The house was a old 2 story kit home from Sears with the only bath upstairs. an old floor furnace for heat and there was 80 acres of irrigated and 160 dryland grass. granddad had 12 sows and 10 cows. grandma had some chickens and they both worked from daylight to dark. My cousin told me awhile back that my granddad was the only one she knew that could divide a 10 oz. bottle of 7 up between 6 kids and we all thought we had just won a million dollars. He farmed with a 41 Farmall M which I still own to this day. an H and an 39 allis b he bought in 1945 for 450.00. The son of the man that owned the farm told me just a couple years ago that my granddad and his dad never had one ill word about or with each other. that made me feel good to hear but never doubted it one second as that was the kind of man my grandfather was. He had to leave the farm in fall of 1970 due to health and he was 67 years old. He passed away three years later and my dad his passed away 4 month later at age of 42 with cancer. Lost them both within 4 months. and as a teenager and young adult, I use to enjoy driving by the old place, but so many different owners and changes, it just is not the same. The house is gone and a modular sets in its place. all little out buildings, single car garage is all gone. the pole shed for cows that my grandfather and my uncle, who died in a car wreck at age 24, built is tore down and all the tin and posts set in a big pile up on the 320 dray pasture. The only thing that remains there now that was there in the fall of 1970 is the 1000 bushel 14 foot dia. grainery. I hate to say it but it is so sad to drive out by the place any more that I just do not go. Just typing this will bring tears to my eyes, so I know what you and others have and are going thru. RIP Wilbur S Losey 1903-1973. Gone but never forgotten.
 
I understand completely how you feel. Dad bought a little 30 and 1/2 acre farm in 1950 for $2500. In the early seventies he sold it for over $30,000, and bought two acres of land with a mobile home on it. It was great for him and mom, had enough land for large garden, some fruit trees and grape vines, but I surely did, and still do, miss that little place.
My sister said she talked to the lady who bought the place, her husband is dead now, and sis asked her if she would consider selling. She said she might. I know that my sister would sell out and buy the old place back if her old man would allow her. I keep hoping she will, 'cause I would move back to that neighborhood in a heartbeat!
 
I bought this place built this house 40 years ago. Very fortunate to still have most of the same neighbors after all these years, but there's only two of us still farming, and that's on a part-time basis. Most of the neighborhood kids that kept life interesting in the 80's and 90's have moved away, and the rest of us are getting older.
 
As the late great Roger Miller wrote:

Some people bad, some people good
Too bad the bad can't be like the good
But everything changes a little and it should
Good ain't forever and bad ain't for good

(from Lou's Got The Flu)

Zach
 
some changes 2 cheese factories a creamery
3. imp dealers several grocery and clothing
stores lots of small farmers. now mcdonalds
dollar stores 1 grocery store a few big farmers
1 imp dealer lots of mexican labours and as
my uncle says we have finnally made it when
we got a tatoo parler
 
Ya'll making me feel really bad. We bought my
mom's family place and all the buildings are
falling down. Can't fix them cause they are eat up
with wood borers and rot. Still makes me feel bad
like I'm not doing my best to take care of what
they built here. No money to rebuild the shed, no
need to rebuild the barn.
 
Didn't grow up on a farm, but the house I grew up in is only 12 or so miles away from me. We lived in my great Grandma's old house, right next door to my Great Uncle, with my Grandma's house and property within walking distance right behind us. Our old house is still standing, but the woods across the street is now a grocery store, 4 houses up the hill they took the fields and woods I played and hunted in turned it into an elementary school. The properties where my Great Uncle's place, my Grandma's place, and another neighbors places all stood are now a huge mini-storage facility. Unfortunately the way the city zoned things and let all the commercial crap, but especially the school, be built, it dropped the value of the land dramatically over what it is in other areas. Basically with the school there, two convenience stores, a drug store, a tire store, a fast food place, etc, etc, etc, the uses for the property, beyond residential, are very limited. Thing is nobody wants to live with all of that crap around them, so selling residential has been impossible....and selling commercial isn't hitting on much either because of the city's zoning....Now the old house, and Dad's old shop, are both sitting there in disrepair because no one has the money to fix it up,making things just that much more impossible when it comes to selling......Makes me sick every time I drive by the old place.....
 
Just think how the Indian would feel. To go back in time I would like to see a heard of 5000 buffalo. I just would like to see what they looked like traveling across the country.
 
I can relate. In the late 70s my parents sold off the 200 acres that had been in the family since the 1870s. It was the right decision, but it always did something to me to go back there and look at the place where my mother grew up, where I grew up. The old house is now gone, bulldozed. The dairy barn is still there, but falling in now.
 
Yep I can relate, I lived on my grandfathers farm
for ten years after he passed my Mom and Uncle
owned it. Grandpa took pride in keeping it up and
we did too. After it was sold it was let go the
barn caved in from snow, we went by and saw all
toilets and cast iron radiators outside of the
house so I guess they let it freeze now its been
abandoned for years and hate to drive by. We have
great pictures going back to about 1900 of the
farm and horse days if I get them on this computer
would like to post some.
 
I guess I"ve taken the advice an old granfather gave me years ago when I asked him how he managed to keep going when a lot of his age group were already dead.

"Well, boy, I learned to quit wandering thru too many old memories, both goodens and baduns. Kinda like an old mule - ya keep him lookin" straight ahead where he"s plowin and don"t be lettin" him look back to the barn and the shade and the hay. Otherwise he ain"t gonna be worth nuthin" to hisself or to his owner."

I guess it works for me. As long as I see work needing to be done in front of me, I"ll keep on trying. Let me look too much toward where I"ve been and I might just get ornery enough to sit down like a stubborn donkey and be useless to me and those around me.
 
Don't badmouth the 'Almighty Dollar' as it is what matters if you want to pay for something and hang onto it. The new owner probably puts the Almighty Dollar ahead of spending the time keeping the place neat and clean so he'll be able to pay for the place and not have to sell out.
Spending time weedeating, cutting grass,fancy board fences instead of wire etc etc may look good to some but it pays back Zero $$$$.Once the place is free and clear then its a different deal.
 
No complaint from me. I frequently pine for the older times and simpler life although net worth is much improved these days. Certainly would give much away to have the home farm and past family members around again. Grandchildren make it less painful.
 

We pretty well quit farming in 96, but my dad tinkered with it and hobby farmed till his death in 2003. I miss it, but I still have the land and some of the equipment. My favorite thing to do now is to putter around on the 706 German Diesel that we bought new in 68. It keeps me grounded and I can brush hog with it and bring back all the good memories and forget the bad.

It generally all works out for the best.

Gene
 
Thanks to all who voiced words of understanding.
Today, as I stopped to pick up our boys (grandpa is daycare) they were both snuggled up with him, looking at a tractor book.
Made me realize that even though they won't grow up the same way, or in the same place I did, things are probably for the best.
 

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