There’s no shortage of jokes about farmers and ranchers asking for a discount or inquiring if a free hat can be included with a purchase. My grandfather once told me, “It never hurts to ask — the worst they can tell you is ‘No’.”
Whether frugal out of necessity or mere habit, the thrift of farmers and ranchers provides plenty of innovation for inexpensive materials. The main corral at the ranch was built with used pipe and cable from a nearby oilfield. Drilling pipe and pump rods were the raw materials that made up most of the gates as well.
One of my first real jobs on the ranch was painting what seemed to be miles of rusty metal. We’d go to the hardware store for a couple gallons of the cheapest oil-based aluminum paint available then thin it down with turpentine. My grandmother crafted crude mittens out of a fleece material we used to guide the paint over the curved surface of the pipe to turn it a shining silver and prevent further corrosion.
Just about every building was crafted and maintained in the same fashion. The house, garage and barn were built with limestone quarried onsite. A haybarn was later built similarly to today’s pole barns, only the trusses, purlins and girts were pipe. The corrugated metal was attached with nails spotwelded to the pipe. When the galvanized coating weathered away, the roofs and sides also got a coat of aluminum paint.
All of these were built primarily for their utility rather than aesthetics, though they’re all charming in their own way. As time and markets allowed, most received upgrades in addition to the occasional coat of paint over the years. The house had an addition, the garage got new doors, and new tin was placed on the gable ends of the barn, but they remained rustic remnants of the materials readily available when they were constructed.
There’s evidence of similar resourcefulness on farms and ranches everywhere. If your land was close to a railyard, odds are good there’s been a boxcar or two offering storage at some point. In some places, retired boxcars served as makeshift barns or chicken coops and deteriorated to nothing.
On other farms, the boxcars went on foundations and are still storing items or they’ve been enveloped by a series of expansions to comprise a tiny portion of a larger structure. The modern equivalent is the thousands of shipping containers that have become a common storage solution on many operations.
Using native material also has a long history on farms, some examples like stone fences are easily visible from the road. Before barbed wire, dry stone walls were common ways to mark a property line or keep in livestock. I encourage everyone to examine one up close at least once in their life to see how something can look simple from a distance but be incredibly intricate up close. There’s no mortar or adhesive other than the weight of the stones artfully stacked in an interlocking fashion. They’re more than 100 years old in most of Kansas while others around the world have stood for thousands of years.
With some sweat and ingenuity, farmers and ranchers will find a use for just about everything. From turning old tires into livestock waterers or making compost in a chemical tote, the number of repurposed items on farms grows out of thrift and necessity.
“Insight” is a weekly column published by Kansas Farm Bureau, the state’s largest farm organization whose mission is to strengthen agriculture and the lives of Kansans through advocacy, education and service.
