Barns vanish in a modernized Iowa

As farms get bigger, so does fight for land

Rod Scott stood outside a crumbling barn in Iowa Falls. Scott, known as the Barn Guy, is trying to save the state's remaining farmland icons. The state now has 50,000 barns, a fraction of what it had in the 1930s. (Nicole Bengiven/ The New York Times)

IOWA FALLS, Iowa - One by one, the old-fashioned barns that speckle this landscape are vanishing. Some are demolished to make way for new cornfields. Others, weak with years, simply crumple.

"She's going to go," Rod Scott said wistfully, gazing up at a stone barn from the 1850s, walls buckling. Down a gravelly road, he sighs at a small barn decorated with a mural, standing but stooping slightly now. A bit farther, holes in the walls of another offer a flash of some forgotten life - a rusted rocking chair, a beer can, an old bed frame. And on one rise sits a ruin, the oak beams of a barn fully collapsed, hay bales still at the ready, crushed beneath.

"We're trying to ring that alarm bell," said Scott, whom people here have come to call the Barn Guy for his insistence on trying to save some of Iowa's 50,000 remaining barns, icons that turned up again and again in a guidebook to the state's landmarks that was produced during the Great Depression and has recently been published online.

But the tale of the disappearing barn, a building whose purpose shifted, then faded away, tells a bigger story, too, of how farming itself, a staple in this state then and now, has changed markedly since those writers drove through.

What had in the 1930s been an ordinary farm here - 80 or 160 acres and a few cows and sheep and chickens - is today far bigger and more specialized to pay for air-conditioned, GPS-equipped combines and tractors, so much fuel, and the now-skyrocketing price of farmland.

Competition for land - to rent or buy - has grown cutthroat, a matter of networking and schmoozing (at church, at the local coffee shop, while selling seed) worthy of the corporate boardroom. (Some here tell of people who call the widows of farmers who have died days or hours earlier, hoping to secure land.)

All of that has left some of Iowa's youngest, newest farmers doubtful that one could make a start in farming anymore without roots and connections and land dating back, say, to the Work Projects Administration era.

Back then, the state boasted more than 200,000 barns, Scott said - splashes of color, often red in Iowa's otherwise endless, mesmerizing rows of green. The WPA writers told of barn dances. They noted lightning rods that had come to top barn after barn.

After the writers moved on, machines, more and more, took the place of handwork and workhorses, and these farm implements grew ever bigger, more powerful, more expensive. Farms, in turn, ballooned in acreage. But they shrank drastically in number. So farmhouses, schools, farming towns, even Scott's beloved barns emptied, making way in some cases for the low, flat confinement buildings that now house the thousands of animals.

That period, as described in the guide, was steeped in a sense of community, an innocent warmth: county fair days, band concert nights, when farm families rushed through chores to gather for music, and threshing runs, when neighbor farmers helped one another with the harvest (before combines made that simpler, solitary work) and their wives gathered to prepare mountainous feasts of meat, potatoes, pie.

These days, a farmer's land can stretch into thousands of acres. When the WPA's writers came through, they wrote that Iowa had 221,986 separate farms on land totaling more than 34 million acres. Today, on only a little less land (31.5 million acres), Iowa has just 88,400 farms. More than half the farmland is owned by people 65 years old or older, an Iowa State University farm economist said, and about half of that is owned by those 75 or older.

But the notion that young people, lured by big cities, have left purely by choice is not always so. On a gravel road near Albert City, a machine - some surreal cross between a spaceship and a gargantuan Transformers toy - suddenly appears in the distance. It stands 19 feet off the ground, its gaping boom, full of insecticide to battle the aphids in soybean plants, jutting out 90 feet.

This sprayer ($168,000, used) is the latest tool in the kit of Josh Bellcock, 31, who farms 3,000 acres with family members. Without his family land and his longstanding ties to older farmers who live here (and from whom he rents land), Bellcock said he probably could not succeed as a young farmer starting out. Not now.

"I'm pretty lucky," Bellcock said. "People aren't willing, unless it's a family member, to go out of their way to help someone else."