When I was growing up, living off the land is just like my father and grandfather before him, farmhouses were not seen as something glamorous. People built a farm house for one purpose: running a farm. The idea of making farm style houses would have seemed absurd back then. It wasn’t a glamorous life, although it was one that we loved. It involves hard work from morning until night, and though we usually had most of the winter off, we were often beset by worries over whether or not there would be enough stock in the farm houses to last until the harvest came in again.
You can tell a way of life is on the way out when he comes back into style again. Nowadays, historic farm houses are all the rage. The dying farming community that I live in has recently become the host of an influx of rich city people trying to "get away from it all". I recognize this sentiment, and in some ways I admire. It isn’t their fault they came from the cities, and a lot of people do want to get back to the land. Nonetheless, the days of authentic farm houses are over. All these vanity farmers finding farm houses for rent, wearing overalls and pretending to be stereotypical hayseeds from some movie kind of tick me and the other locals off from time to time. It is nothing personal, it’s just that they are emulating a life that we have loved and lost. Things have changed and will never go back to how they were.
Nonetheless, there’s a good side to this as well. There are lots of people out here who have land that has been fallow for years and years at this point. A lot of them have been able to make money off of this renewed economic boon, conducting farmhouse tours, renting farm houses to tourists who want to try it out for a season, and even giving advice to new farmers. And I do have to admit that it is nice to see people coming in and working the land again. It’s good land, and it’s a shame that the factory farms put so many people out of business in the first place. Even if these farmhouses are being used as holiday houses, at least they are being used again. That is more than we had hoped for a generation ago.
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