Reroot Farm’s Heritage Barn Restoration
Help preserve local rural history and architecture by funding repairs to our 150-year-old barn.
Reroot’s beautiful bank barn needs your help! Our heritage barn is more than 150 years old and a vital part of our small, organic, diversified farm, as well as local, rural history and architecture. Your support will allow us to make critical structural repairs, enabling the barn to stand for another century. We have some great perks to thank you for your support. Please spread the word!
Reroot farm lives on 70 acres of paradise in Wellington County, Ontario, Canada, where we grow organic vegetables and raise pastured livestock. One of the first things you notice when you arrive at the farm is our 150-year-old heritage bank barn. Our barn provides winter housing for our cattle, sheep, pigs and hens, hay and straw storage, a place to park farm equipment and even a spot to cure the onions and garlic we grow in our market garden. The barn is not only a beautiful piece of rural heritage and architecture, but also a functional central part of our farm.
Reroot Farm is celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this year! That’s 10 years of growing and raising healthy, happy food, feeding our community and training more young farmers to help grow the local, sustainable food movement.
Our barn is a relic of a time when all farms were small, family-run, diversified operations. Sadly, over the past century, many of these beautiful bank barns – made from locally sourced stones and wood, crafted with hand-hewn beams and stone and mortar foundations – have been replaced by more specialized steel barns, or simply crumbled due to years of neglect.
While our barn was in need of some repairs when it first became ours just over six years ago, the required repairs became urgent earlier this summer when a tractor we were using to put hay in the barn crashed through the floor, breaking boards and beams and crumbling the foundation along the bank wall.
The rush is on to get these urgent repairs done before winter as we’ve been told if the frost gets behind the bank wall it will surely heave and buckle and cause the barn to fall taking with it not only a part of our livelihood but also a piece of rural heritage.
Farmers are by nature self-sufficient, resilient and stoic folk. It’s hard for us to ask for help!
We’ve consulted with a local expert in bank barn restoration and have received estimates to repair the damage and correct other issues before the barn suffers more catastrophic damage.
The labour and materials required to repair the foundation, replace the boards and beams, and reinforce the walls total approximately $20,000.
In addition to the daunting barn repairs, this season has been incredibly challenging:
Being a small farm, we don’t have a lot of expendable income. Everything we’ve made over the last 10 years has been reinvested back into the farm: a farm store in 2013, new greenhouses and farm equipment, and constant investment in the health of our soil.
Needless to say, we could really use your support! We are reaching out to our broader community of friends, customers, local food lovers, history buffs and farm fans to help lighten our load.
We’re not asking for a hand out: we have lots to offer in exchange and of course we’ll sing your praises from the highest barn roof we can find!
In exchange for your kind and generous support we will honour all donors on a donor wall in the barn once repairs are complete. This is your chance to become a permanent part of rural heritage.
We also have a number of great perks to offer including farm experiences and products, beautiful works of art featuring our heritage barn by our friend and talented artist Wesley Bates, and Reroot swag such as engraved walnut cutting boards and postcards featuring photos from around the farm.
By supporting our Heritage Barn Restoration you will not only be helping to repair and restore a beautiful piece of history on our farm, you’ll also be supporting a small, sustainable farm and the young farmers who make a living from and life on this farm.
We hope to be growing and raising good food for many years to come here at Reroot and your support will enable us to do just that.
Spread the word to others who love farms, farmers, barns, history, and food!
Share our campaign on social media and by email with other folks you think might be interested.