David Elias - The Truth About the Barn

The Truth About the Barn

Copyright 2020 David Elias

Great Plains Publications

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Winnipeg, MB R 3 G 1 H 1

www.greatplains.mb.ca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M 5 E 1 E 5.

Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

Printed in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The truth about the barn : a voyage of discovery and contemplation / David Elias.

Names: Elias, David, 1949- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200291815 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200291882 |
ISBN 9781773370507 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773370514 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Barns.

Classification: LCC NA 8230 . E 45 2020 | DDC 725/.372dc23

For Autrey

(Meet you at the Pony Corral)

The Idea of the Barn

Barn as Cathedral

Theres No Place Like Barn

Scenes From a Barn

Pop Goes the Barn

Back in the Day

The Repurposed Barn

Out Behind the Barn

Who Said Size Doesnt Matter?

Dont Fence Me In

Raising a Stink

Barnyard Lexicon

Danger in the Barn

Good Barn Hunting

Bits and Pieces

Who Said Size Doesnt Matter?

There were beams across the second story, supporting poles on which the hay was piled. What great haymows they were, choice romping places for children!

Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt

If huge sprawling barns make the practice of animal husbandry more efficient and productive these improvements dont come without a price. One of the problems with big barns where so many animals are raised in close proximity is that disease can spread quickly with devastating results. An intensive poultry operation where birds are crowded together in dry and dusty conditions is an ideal place for a viral outbreak. But there is also a genetic factor. The animals are bred for faster growth rates and higher meat yields, sometimes for higher rates of egg or milk production, and to accomplish that little room is left for genetic variation. Diversity is the enemy. Uniformity is the desired outcome of any breeding strategy, and ideally, every turkey and chicken should be identical to every other so that when the final product reaches the store shelf the quality control is so high that every T-bone steak looks every other T-bone steak, every pot roast and broiler chicken is interchangeable with every other.

A few of the more common diseases that can affect a flock of chickens include Aspergillosis, Avian Influenza, Histomoniasis, Botulism, Campylobacteriosis, Coccidiosis, Erysipelas, Fatty Liver Hemorrhagic Syndrome, Fowl Cholera, Fowlpox, Fowl Typhoid, Gallid Herpesvirus, Gapeworm, Infectious Bronchitis, Infectious Bursal Disease, Mareks Disease, Psittacosis, Pullorum, Squamous Cell Carcinoma, Tibial Dyschondroplasia, Toxoplasmosis, and Ulcerative Enteritis.

Breeding for genetic uniformity also brings about another side effect: the animals become more susceptible to disease because their immune systems become increasingly compromised. A new virus can spread with alarming speed and efficiency. And when a virus makes the leap to another species as sometimes happens, a disease like Covid-19 or Avian flu becomes a threat not only to the animals but to the humans who come into contact with them.

Overcrowding and genetic breeding can make domestic animals more susceptible to disease, but it can also make them less intelligent. The job of feeding all those turkeys fell to my grandfather and me and wed start as soon as I got home from school. Just as in the former place, the traditional barn had been converted into a granary, gutted and cleaned up to be used for feed storage, and wed spend hour upon hour in there throwing buckets of wheat and oats and various supplements into a hammer mill to be shredded. Then it was shot into a big mixer my father had welded together that was large enough to process six tons of grain at a go.

When the mixer was full, wed use a tractor to haul it out to the turkey barn and fill up the feeders there. The turkeys would gather in huge flocks to follow the proceedings, and we would have to go slow to keep from running them over. As soon as we stopped, they would surround the mixer entirely, and it happened sometimes that some rogue bits of grain would fall onto a metal ledge that ran along the back of the mixer. These morsels looked very inviting to the birds, but to get at it they had to stick their necks out, literally, and risk getting caught up in the gigantic chain that turned upon an enormous sprocket there. The unfortunate bird would get hoisted up into air and carried around the full circumference of the wheel, only to fall back to the ground with its neck all but severed. It was an arresting sight, but the learning curve for the avian bystanders was practically zero. The rest of the flock would disperse momentarily and in short order go right back to pecking at the bits of grain falling onto the ledge. I think we must have welded some sort of shield into place to keep it from happening, but the truth is I cant remember.

Near the end of one growing season we had an alarming outbreak of disease, and because so many birds were dying, my father insisted they should be collected and stored until he could choose a few samples to take to Winnipeg, where the animal scientists at the University of Manitoba would examine them in order to determine what was killing them. I knew it was a bad idea to leave them there for long, but I was forbidden from hauling them off, and when the weather turned cold and ground froze, still they lay piled up inside the barn. They were forgotten over the course of the winter until spring brought an early wave of warm weather that thawed the birds out and left me to deal with the mess.

I knew it was going to be bad even before I pulled the stone boat up to the entrance and forced myself to open the door of the shed. The stench was unearthly, but I felt relieved to discover that the pile of dead turkeys appeared to have survived relatively intact. It wasnt until I went to get hold of one and the turkeys leg came away from the rest of carcass effortlessly that I suspected things might be worse than Id feared. Id brought the pitchfork with me for just this eventuality and now I thrust it into the pile and made the mistake of moving things around. The entire mass suddenly came alive, and as I lifted the fork away thousands of maggots rained down out of it. With each forkful they fell like rice from the carrion, which had disintegrated and putrefied to such a degree that forking it up became all but impossible.

Worse, in disturbing the rotting mass the smell became greatly intensified. I fought to keep from throwing up. My only salvation rested in a brisk southerly wind that often accompanied such early warm weather. It allowed me to effect a strategy where I took a few steps upwind, inhaled deeply, ran back to plunge the pitchfork into the writhing mass, threw the carrion onto the stone boat (still holding my breath), and then stepped back upwind, lungs bursting, to take in a fresh supply of air. It went on for a very long time, and I made many trips to feather hill.