This barn no longer had a use in modern ag, we have had several people look at it for the lumber and beams and all passed on it. We needed it gone for several reasons, feedlot expansion which you seen beside old barn, tax burden, and insurance would not let us put coverage on it so it was becoming a liability hazard. We did save a few beams out of it for new shop/office decor.
Chris is a smart farmer who put pencil to paper adding up the costs of keeping an old barn he can't use for modern-day farming. The taxes alone justify the demo. He tried to sell it with no takers so he did what was in his farms best interest. And hired the right guy for the job
That was one epic agrarian conflagration. Thank goodness you had Cap’n K on speed dial! We are so used to seeing houses and buildings with 8’ or better walls.. we really notice low ceilings. In an old barn like that... the livestock needed shelter. The equipment they pulled needed storage. None of it was over 6’ tall. The important thing was storing enough hay to make it through the winter. Hence a loft. Now, why would it take so much room for haying 8 cows, their calves, a few sheep, a couple of goats and the three or four horses that they had? Two things... 1. the hay was loose. There were no balers. 2. The hay had low protein/nutrient values. Hybrid seed was expensive and rarely used on small farms. In its day... that barn was the pride of the neighborhood. Thanks for putting it down gracefully!
Yessir, liability, liability, liability..., that is the only thing that needs to be said. Chris is on the right path here, it is probably best that he did not allow a salvage crew on the property without hard paper proof of their liability insurance, and even then his homeowners insurance probably wouldn't knowingly allow it to take place. I too have a great appreciation for these old barns, but this one, as was already mentioned, has served its purpose... Clear all the foot traffic out to a 200ft radius, and let the demo begin... Great video Mike, pay no mind to the trolls behind the curtain. Thank you sir.
Hello there. A lot of our old barn's are not practical. So we are not so bad in that ours are built with stone. So people convert them into Houses. So they finish up with a extra house for there son's. Some are fantastic, they leave all the old beams exposed on the inside. I have worked on a few of them myself. Henry Wilson from Clitheroe Lancashire England. Say Hi to the farmer for me, it's so interesting to hear about that little bit of History.
There isn't many of us left in this country that has been around milking by hand and the milk man picking up the milk in cans and putting up loose hay in the barn with horses. When we put hay up around our area in Minnesota back in the day it wasn't each farm did their own but the neighbors all helped one another and that was our social media. The women all got together and cooked and the men would all get the hay put up. We actually knew what our neighbors looked like. Now you just know what kind of car they drive when they go by.
Farmer Chris Grandpa died in 51 and my uncle bought a couple surge milkers was when they quit milking by hand. Was 4 years before I was born. In the sixties the barn burnt and we keep some cows and milked by hand 2 at a time in a little shed until we got a small barn built. I was glad when we broke out the surge milkers again after that. Although we had two neighbors that milked by hand until they I guess what you call retired around 75 or so that milked by hand. One had around 18 and the other would milk up to 30 cows. Both it was a family affair, no matter what the weather or how sick or tired you were they milked.
Shawn Jerome We never got in trouble because we worked and usually were to tired to cause problems. We did get into trouble horse playing on the farm like riding the calves or throwing feed on one another but it was a family law we broke not state or federal one. And it would have never crossed out minds to protest and loot and burn someone else's stuff. If our pee brain would have ever even entertain that thought our heads and rears would have been hurting for a week or so.
@@farmerchris1 I grew up on a dairy farm... milked by hand until we got 12 cows. Then we put in Surge Miller’s... I was 12yr old. Those filters you picked up went in the bottom of a strainer funnel. They are sized to fit the inside of a milk can. When Mike said that he thought they milked 8 cows for their own use...I almost fell out of my chair. That would be 16-20 gallons a milking from a Jersey farm and double that from Holsteins... back then. Far more from today’s breeds. I actually used a hay lift and trolley, like that one, to fill the loft.. every summer for 6 years! It seems like a different world now!!!
Well done! Don't think most people realize how dangerous doing something like that can be... Most job site injuries I have seen have come from Demo... Got a lil nervous when the big roof started to fall!
Hate to see history go away like that but from Chris's standpoint it is understandable. He has to look at it from a business standpoint and do what is best for the farm. That is what I would call a barn smashing good time...
Wow those beams here in UK would be worth an absolute fortune, I understand there’s quite a market for antique wood beams. As it goes they don’t make em like that anymore well not in UK. Great video as always.
Awesome work!!!!! That old barn was gonna collapse in the next 10 years. I’m glad you helped that farmer with demolishing that barn because demolition is a very difficult task. Burning it on the spot was a perfect idea! There was an enormous amount of lumber so you definitely saved about 100 trips with and blowing through all of that fuel to do it. All of that old straw and dried out wood certainly went up quick! Work smarter, not harder. Awesome video!
At 72, I am not old! As a teenager I milked cows by hand. We did not have electricity and churned cream and made butter to sell as well as sold milk in glass gallon jars and sold eggs too. We raised a few hogs and cows. The beef cows were sold to pay land taxes not to eat.
a bunch of us went after barnwood several years ago. We would hang one or two forcite stumping powder sticks in the rough geographical center of the old barn and set them off. it would "bump"all the wood and either blow it clean off or loosen it enough to pull it free .No hammer marks or pry bar marks.
This is one of those videos you can tell a lot of people didn't pay any attention to when you and Chris were talking at the start. If no one shows up to buy the beams or wood, its worthless, so just get rid of it. The old barn held up pretty well considering the age and a tornado. I had half expected it to collapse with one or two good shoves. I think by now the super stick has paid for its purchase and modification.
Mike thank you so much . Tell farmer Chris thank you very much as well. It is so great to see the real America. We get the usual diet of the extremes of America in both properties and people. This is what makes America tick. I find this extremely interesting. This shows the hardwork and ingenuity of the past and it’s good to have a record of these things. Chris can show his grandchildren what was there and what it looked like and this links the generations. Good work.
Watching this video reminded me of a time back in the '70s when a guy I knew took over a grass seed farm in Oregon after his father died suddenly. The state just had prohibited burning off the fields claiming the need to protect air quality. So the young guy decided to burn the fields at night so that no one would see what he was up to. The neighbors called the fire department, thinking that the farm buildings were burning. A pumper truck got stuck in the field and was damaged by the fire. Tough lesson for the the young guy to learn. #captainkleeman
I remember when we shortened a barn, this should have been in the summer of 1970. The whole barn was sawn off, except the ridge. When they sawed off the log that was in the ridge, the barn collapsed like a house of cards.
This may have been mentioned already, but I'm not scrolling through 400+ comments to see. There is a documentary type video of an Amish (I believe) family. It shows the whole hay process. From cutting to stacking in the barn. All with mules. It's fairly detailed on how the rope and fork works for stacking in the barn.
The super stick worked fine for that barn!!!!!!!! In Mass you would have to get a permit, have a detail fire truck on site as long as the fire was burning!
All that old barn wood, my wife is going nuts right now thinking about her arts & crafts she could have made with all that! I wonder if the whole community came there to help build that barn like they do with the Amish. I have relatives in PA that are Quakers and they do that.
Believe connecting the posts to the beams were wooden pins. If true wish you would have pointed that out. Shame the bldg was next to worthless but would not deny it. Bldg probably should have gone away in '74! The good news, it was here for you to remove with great video, thanks.
Having lived and worked on a dairy farm, cow manure can change the floor height significantly in a few years! Ive used the milk filters, OBTW. Have to confess to being a little teary eyed thinking about how and when the barn was constructed and used. Oh the tales it could tell. If you could have sent me a couple of sections of the beams, I could have made you and Farmer Chris a bowl. Thanks for sharing, I think.
Back in mid 70's we got the experience of a lifetime , we went to visit our great grandparents in oklahoma they lived in a single wide trailer on a hog farm I think he worked at the hog farm , I can still smell the experience 🤣
Nice video Mike. Always cool to see other odd jobs like this. The very end answered my question about scrapping the tin from the roof, seemed to be quite a bit, figured it’d be worth something.
A pyromaniacs dream come true..... 😁 As you both mentioned at the start of the video, it is a shame she came to the end of her useful life, it is safe to say it was structurally unsound. Pleased you save a few decent pieces and the hay fork saved. Super stick did the job well and kept you out the way of trouble Mike !! 💪😎
I just started watching Dirt Perfect a couple days ago. Really nicely done video! I always love flying drone clips that help tell the story. You showed what it was like before demolition, had Farmer Chris give a lot of its history and why it had to come down. There are barn dismantlers up my way, but the distance to transport even just pieces of it is prohibitively costly. I suppose FC could have made a bit more $$ salvaging the big beams from the knocked down building, but that probably wasn't cost effective either.
If it was Captain on the job I'd be saying..... But Captain, Chris only wanted a pond at the side 😂😂😂 (Sorry Captain, couldn't resist) As a bonus, no mirrors were damaged during the making of this video 😂😂😂 I'm impressed with the worklights on the Volvo, they certainly put alot of light out compared to some machines I've worked with (It's one of my pet hates, poor lighting) 👍
Would have been great for a master carpenter to come in and dismantled her and make some tables or what out of all that lumber.... if any of it were salvageable...I’ve seen something like that happen a time or two in videos and the furniture that was produced was very incredible and beautiful. Glad to see you work in a smart way... I.e.superstick and method to your madness... although it did look like just smack and bang at first....
That super stick extension worked well allowing you to be sat off an extra distance from the bucket and barn debris making it safer for you and your machine.
Our barn which was close to this size unexpectedly blew down last year, I decided to make lemonade out of lemons and am in the process of putting it through our outdoor woodstove for winter heat. I think I'll get at least 2 and maybe three yrs very easy working heat out of it.
Great Job , Great Video , Hard to see it come down , but was of no use the way it was. I'm in the same shape with my old barn but must first dispose of the asphalt shingles . (most) everyone who follows your work KNOWS you are TOP NOTCH , and those who would insinuate otherwise should watch a different channel. I enjoy watching you because you're the best.
This reminds me of the dairy barn where I grew up on our family farm back in the 1940's. That barn also had manually operated hay forks on a pulley system. We kept fixing that barn until we also had to take it down... sad to see it go.
The farm got it's money out of that old barn. Amazing how long it lasted considering it had been through a tornado and over 100 years of weather and abuse. Our pioneer forefathers certainly knew how to build things with hand tools and ungraded lumber.
My dad used to talk about milking cows by hand, said you had to be careful who you shook hands with. Some old boy that milked by hand his whole life would have a bear trap grip and unknowing but a hurt on you. Thanks for sharing.
My dad had to milk cows when he was young. He said the worst part was winter. The cow's crap and piss would freeze into a ball on the end of its tail. You would be sitting on a small stool doing the milking. The cow would swing that tail back and forth into your face.
Tornadoes in 1974 devastated the timber on our farm. It was set by the CCC in the thirties. The adjoining farm lost barns, silos, and houses. Charleston,TN
Perhaps 50 years ago my Dad and I dismantled several timber frame barns to salvage the wood. Working on a structurally sound barn was scary enough. I got hives just looking at this place. Liability is a plenty good reason to demo it as you did as no amount of salvaged wood (no matter how good) is worth your life.
Dam your old Aaron I always thought I was older than you, you sure look young for being a hundred years old ! Much love to you all and to your family's ! Lol !
@@aaronbummmanbehindthescene4931 I think even you would bump your head there. And this is coming from the guy that was on your side sticking up for you when the skunk sprayed Mr. Millennial when he leaped over the 8’ wall holding a GoPro.
In my area we a barn from the 1890's and it is being used as commercial building for feed. Cool buildings but when it is time to go it is to time to go. I realized that burning the barn would have need the fire department on site because it would burn hot because of the hay, the tree would be singed. :)
