WORKING THE LAND

Al and Dave

A SELF-SUSTAINING FARMER

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA MODLIN

Al Barney was raised to believe that if there is something you need you should build it yourself. And at the age of 92, he has had plenty of experience doing just that.

His family moved onto 35 acres in Easton in 1929. Back then there was plenty that needed to be built. The property was all brush and open fields, but piece-by-piece they assembled a home, a farm, a life, and a legacy. Their first order of business was shelter. The 10-year-old future farmer and his mother, father, and brother needed a home. There was a barn across the street on Bridgeport Hydraulic land that they moved onto their land to use until they had their own dwelling.

“We carried everything over. Each piece. One at a time,” Al remembers. Once the barn was reassembled, the family lived in its end section while the livestock that helped them work the land lived in another part of the barn. This arrangement continued until 1935 when the family home was finally complete.

“It took Dad that long to collect secondhand lumber,” says Al. His father, a carpenter, would work on crews tearing down houses and take lumber from the debris. During that time Al’s mother raised chickens, and once a week Al’s dad would take her into town to sell eggs and vegetables off their truck.

Al and his brother walked to school each day and would come home in the afternoons to help build their house and tend to the land that eventually became Lakeview Orchards. “The orchard was my father’s idea,” says Al. “Dad started the orchard around 1931 with 50 trees.”

There are currently 20 acres of peach and apple trees—containing 18 apple varieties—and an additional two acres of vegetable garden. And now Al has a grown son of his own to work with him. “Dave works here all the time and goes to farmers’ markets,” says Al of his only son. Al’s daughter, Joan, works at a flower garden in Fairfield and helps out at the family’s farm stand on Route 59.

They harvest peaches at the beginning of August and apples at the end of the month. When there is a large enough harvest of apples, cider is pressed at the farm in the barn they brought over from across the street way back when. The cider is typically available by the end of September or beginning of October.

All those crops take work and equipment. And Al’s brightest creative passion is building machines that help his family and him work the land. He has created several throughout the years. What he has needed to understand he has learned from magazines and books and by using his intellect and good old-fashioned common sense.

One day when Al was in his tree-pruning machine, lifted up high working on a tree, the door came unlatched and he fell to the ground. Determined to never let this happen again, he refashioned the door on the basket part of the machine so that when it closes it will not release until the operator opens it.

An extended plank on the apple picking truck

The cider press

Al and Joan at the stand

Another of his designs, put together 35 years ago, is a flattop truck with a platform that lifts 20 feet into the air for picking apples. Planks slide out from the sides so the apple pickers can easily, effortlessly, get to the fruit.

Among the other homemade machines on the farm is a vehicle for carrying buckets of apples and the press they use to make cider. One bushel of apples, taken from tree to press with the help of Al’s inventions, can produce four gallons of cider; the fresher the apples, the higher the yield.

As the years went by, Al stayed on his family’s land. He met his wife, Dorothy, at a square dance. They married in 1948, and he brought her to live on the farm in their own small house that he built to begin a life with his new bride.

In addition to building the house, he has worked his mechanical magic on their living quarters by making a great deal of what they use inside run automatically. “Most you’d never hear about,” says Al of the novelty of the gadgets he’s produced, bearing testament to his creativity and the unique touch he has used to make a life that is distinctly his.

Al has only traveled a significant distance from his home three Times—once each to California, Hawaii, and Florida. His wife says he should take a couple years off “while he still can” and travel some more. But Al is happy where he is and doing what he does. “I still have a lot of stuff I want to make,” he says. “I’m gonna lay low for a few more years.” And in spite of all the harvests, machines, gadgets, and the indelible legacy under his belt, there is another dream he has, another piece of equipment to bring to life with his innovative touch: “I was going to work on a machine that drives posts into the ground, tomato stakes, and weaves baling thread in and out of the rows.” This goal keeps him thinking and planning. And with each new day he builds on his passion for the land.

Laura Modlin is an award-winning freelance journalist and a website designer. Her writing specialty is organic farming, local eating, and returning to a simpler way of living. She feels that in a perfect world people would grow food themselves and use area farms to supplement their harvests. Her blog, “A Return to Simple,” can be found at thefarmingjournalist.com.

LAKEVIEW ORCHARDS
76 Easton Road (Route 59)
Monroe (just over the Easton/Stepney border)
Farm stand open early August through December