Friday, 21 July, 2006
Old dairy farm on a foggy morning on Hessong Bridge Road, Frederick County, Maryland.
This grouping of buildings - barn with storage for hay above and milking parlor below, the milk house with tanks to hold the milk, a wash room to clean equipment, and a silo to store silage was the classic arrangement for a dairy farm several decades ago. This was the set up for a family farm with one or two hired men.
Those days are long gone. Now to be profitable, a farm has to be an agribusiness build on a grand scale for efficiency. When you drive through the countryside in the eastern U.S., you can see many non-working farm buildings. Some buildings are falling down. Some have been turned into horse barns or storage for the family's RV. The buildings in this photo are well maintained, but there are no cows in sight, there are no fences around the buildings, and there's no grass turned to mud or dust from daily cow travel.
Very few farms of this size are still used as they were originally intended. One place you can see a working farm on this scale is at A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. Photographer and photoblogger, Kathleen Connally, regularly posts photos of the countryside, including a working farm that seems to operate on this scale.
I grew up on a farm like this in central Pennsylvania. My family farm is long gone. Most of it is now building lots and housing developments.
(Photo info: iso 100, exp. bias +.7, Tamron 18-200 mm lens at 50 mm, f/20, 2 sec, tripod), Hessong Bridge Road, Frederick County, Maryland, June 23, 2006.
Posted By: donnamhughes | Comment (1)
Landscapes, Frederick County
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