The New York Times on September 7 leads with this headline:  Vanishing Barns Signal a Changing Iowa.  In an interesting story, Times Reporter Monica Davey describes how Iowa has changed since Works Progress Administration documented Iowa farm life in a 1930′s guide (available via Google Books )

Times writer  Davey, shares:

“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.”

It is easy to be swept in a nostalgia for older times. It is clearly true that rural life has changed.  The article also shares  some of the comparisons of ag life in Iowa from the ’30′s to today.  The WPA guide suggests Iowa had 221,986 farms in the 1930′s.  The Times articles quotes current USDA figures as  88,400 farms in Iowa today.  This suggests the average size of a farm has grown from 151 acres to 356 acres.

If farming has changed, has farm life changed?  The business of agriculture  is changing. Farm life may be changing less so.   The common descriptors of rural life — the enigmatic quieter, slower, peaceful time, still exits in rural living.

So we’re left with some memories, some remnants of the past, for example, fewer than 50,000 barns.

But maybe that’s okay.  Prior to settlement of the wild prairie and its conversion to farmland, their was a natural process that aided the tall grasses of the prairie like Big Bluestem and Little bluestem.  Wildfire, often started by lightening, would occasionally sweep through the open priarie, scorching most everything in its path, and leaving smaller numbers of visible plants, and a few remnants of once mighty trees.

And in the next season, the new growth would be stronger than the original.

Today’s  small farm dwellers may be  that new season of growth.