For a few short days during mid summer, I can watch the sun set directly over the former Friederick farm from our place across the valley. It’s buildings and silos looming as a landmark on the horizon. A tribute to the many working farms that have went the way that our local coops have. The little feed mills and main street farm stores have long since vanished from our lives. The little dairy farms that dotted our rural country roads and made our local economy thrive will soon be as extinct as the dinosaurs.
Many of the farms have been fragmented by severing the homesteads from the land they once served and sold as farmettes. Our woodlots are now referred to as recreation land and taxed accordingly.
Not many years ago if one needed emergency help it was just a short drive up the road. If you didn’t find anyone at the house or barn you would just drive out in the fields and you could find somebody. Help assisting a first calf heifer giving birth was a common emergency. Sometimes you would need someone with a much bigger tractor to pull you out of a mud hole, that you thought was just a wet spot that turned into a bottomless pit.
A short time ago during one of our wet springs, I got stuck in a seep in one of our fields and I had to call my wife at work and she came home and pulled me out of the mud while wearing her long dress.
Yes, things have changed across America’s heartland and as I now look at the Friederick farm standing on the West Ridge, I see a lifetime of hard work, dedication, and a way of life suspended like so many others in a transitions zone of what once was and the new age of high tech agriculture.
Yep! I think we all miss our old neighborhoods.
Big Valley Longhorn Ranch 