There is this notion that an Amish barn is miraculously raised up by a small army in a day or so, sometimes less, and ready to use. This, I am seeing is not true.
I’m grateful to be able to chronicle an Amish barn as it comes to life, bit by bit, sweat and tears, day after day.
Moise’s barn took weeks, if not months of meticulous planning, and he and his family have been working hard all day every day since the raising. The raising was just the beginning.
It takes a lot of work to raise a barn, it takes a lot of work to make it operable, to bring it to life.
I come by every day but Sunday to monitor the progress of the very difficult task of making the barn workable. Amash barns are complex things, it will be weeks before everything in the barn is ready.
I am in awe of his systems for graining and moving hay around the barn through a series of chutes and slides.
No farm barn is operational without hay and/or straw.
Moise plans to have sheep, goats, horses, and cows in the barn.
That means a lot of hay in the cold weather. The first loads of hay came last week from a local farmer, some from his own field.
Moise’s favorite cart and the horse are now housed in the barn. This is the horse he uses and trusts to get to town and bank in every kind of weather, no matter how much traffic.
In a sense, the horse is an experiment, a chance to see what works, and what needs more work.
Livestock means a lot of manure and a lot of eating.
Every working farm with livestock needs a way to pass manure out of the stalls and into a drain. Some use conveyor builts but that can’t work for the Amish, who can’t use electricity. If I know Moise, a lot of will go to support his crops. or sold
Moise is installing a drainage system that takes the manure away from his farm, he has a system planned for re-using it. The Amish throw nothing away.
I appreciate watching this barn start to come alive. In a month or so it will be teeming with animals, the smell of hay will be strong, the buggies will go in and out all day.
The raising of a barn is a process that I suspect will go on for years and is perhaps never fully done.