I somewhat foolishly assumed that this  very old and beautiful farmhouse down the road was being restored when I saw all the scaffolding and lumber. I should have asked, of course, I didn’t think to. We sometimes see what we want to see. I see the farmhouse, built sometime after 1800 is being demolished, they have taken away the slate roof and a lot of the lumber.

It is not being saved, it is being cannibalized, the old parts of some value. I can’t blame the new owners, the house was falling apart, it had been abandoned for years, the entire back of it was exposed to the wind and snow and rain. No sane person would need to restore it, few would have the money.

In a few days, it will be gone, and I there is a  sadness and sense of loss to that.

We live in an old farmhouse and we cherish it, and they do not make them anymore. This is the story of rural life in our times, and the story of the family farm. Wendell Berry writes that since World War II, the governing agricultural doctrine in government, universities and corporations has been that there are too many people on farms, and not enough working in cities and factories and soulless corporate jobs in the new economy.

Farming was not a job, but a calling, farmers loved their hard lives and independence. Not too many Americans love their work, or have employers who care about them.

This idea of the new agricultural economy has caused one of the most significant migrations in American history, millions of rural people forced from the country to the cities in a vast stream that continues to this day.  We are as disconnected from our food as we are from the lives of the animals we once lived with.

There are few good jobs left in rural America, the corporations want nothing to do with beautiful places that have no workforce eager to slave and suffer, and be tossed in the trash at someone’s whim. The politicians and economists have decided small farms are no longer efficient, only large corporate farms with vast acreage and huge budgets. The force behind the migration, writes Berry and many others, has been the economic ruin of the farm.

With hundreds, even thousands of farm families losing their farms every week, the economists continue to say that these people deserve to fail, that they have failed because they are the least efficient producers in the agricultural spectrum, and all of us are better off for their failure. Food, of uncertain origin, is cheaper and easier to get. The ethos of the Wal-Mart world.

One has to wonder what will happen when the economists decide one day that there are too many people in the cities, as many are already beginning to claim.

“The great question that hovers over this issue,” writes Berry, an author, farmer and environmentalist, “one that we have deal with many by indifference, is the question of what people are for?”  Is their function to garner obscene corporate profits and be discarded in shifting times? Is their greatest dignity in unemployment and dislocation? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our common political and economic goal?

One would have to say yes, says Berry, from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush towards mechanization, automation, computerization, and the global economy, which shifts so much work elsewhere so ruthlessly.

In the country, meanwhile, there is great work to be done, as the old farmhouse reminds us. This is the necessary work of restoring and caring for our farms, forests, rural towns and communities. Work we have not done for decades, work that few people any longer know how to do.

Of course the old farmhouse is being taken down. The farm that once surrounded the old farmhouse has been lost for decades, the old house was just an empty ghost. I will think of it in it’s last and dwindling days and of the farm family that lived there and ask if we remember at all what it is that people are for?