I’ve known Ed Gulley for awhile now, but I was blown away by the tour he gave us of his extraordinary collection of tools, engine parts, chains and hundreds of artifacts that tell the story of the family farm over the past century. Truthfully, I’ve never seen anything like it, and Ed knows the history and meaning of every single one of the thousands of exhibits that spread out over three barns on his dairy farm in White Creek, New York.
Ed and his wife Carol publish the wildly popular Bejosh Farm Journal blog, they write about their rich and evolving lives every day. Maria and I went to the Gulley’s Bejosh farm the other day, and I wanted to take a short video of what I thought would be his workshop.
The video ended up being eight minutes long and I could have gone on for another hour.
Ed has been collecting historical and very timely farm artifacts for decades, they inspire his art, but also his daily work and life. His is a working dairy farm, and there is a new adventure every day. Ed is himself a walking museum of the family farm, and his art is recording and evoking the life of the farm through it’s discarded implements, of which there are many.
Come and see his collection, I imagine it will mesmerize you as it has fascinated Maria and I . Ed is the real deal.
His life is his art. All his sculptures come from engine and other industrial farm tools and parts, and having seen what I call his Family Farm Museum, I grasp the reach of his imagination and experience, and of his art.
Family farms are not pastoral, they are not like the Vermont calendar photos of farms. They are real, gritty and industrial, tractors, cans, pipes and boards lying all over the place. Family farmers are masters of many trades, they fix and patch and repair all day. They castrate animals and birth them, fix tractor engines, re-build barns, build additions and stalls, do wiring and plumbing, run complex systems.
I was shocked by the depth, organization and history of what I call his Family Farm Museum – he calls it his workshop, and it is that. But I sincerely think his collection ought to be seen by anyone interested in farming, it’s history, and the remarkable impact the family farm has had on American life.
Family farms are disappearing, they are struggling against animal rights harassment, too many regulations, competition with giant corporate farms and suffocating federal bureaucracy. I hope Ed will set up his remarkable collection as a museum, everyone should see it. Here’s your chance. I hope you find the tour as exciting as we did.