Labour & Pop Culture: Torn Screen Door

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is "Torn Screen Door” by David Francey. The song is a lament for an abandoned farmstead that the singer stumbles across on a summer walk—a very prairie experience if there ever was one.

Although why exactly the farm was abandoned is unclear, the singer suggests that ultimately the farm family was unable to meet their financial obligations to the bank and it foreclosed:

Had a life that they tried to save
But the banks took it all away
Hung a sign on a torn screen door
Nobody lives here no more

This story very effectively taps into the long history of agricultural foreclosures and shattered dreams. Indeed, opponents of Alberta’s Bill 6 frequently evoke the threat of farm closure when resisting the extension of employment rights to farm workers because it is emotionally powerful.

The long history of such foreclosures along the long-term increase in farm size and gross revenue and decrease in the number of farms suggests that there are structural factors at work in farm failures. I have a co-edited collection forthcoming shortly from the U of A Press that looks at these trends over time.

While Bill 6 may (or may not) slightly bend these trend lines, it is unlikely that it will profoundly affect the direction of the trends, whereby most food is now produced by a small number of very large, industrialized operators.

What this means is that the family farm (in the sense of an nuclear family farming one or two sections as their primary source of income) as the main form of agricultural production is likely long gone. Certainly, there are still many such producers, but their impact on the food supply is small and their financial viability is limited.

While lamenting the passing of the family farm is understandable, mourning it shouldn’t be weaponized to block public policy designed to protect the growing class of waged agricultural producers.



Late summer day and my
Love and I went walking
Over hills and fields
we walked, laughing and talking

Came across an old farmhouse
Standing broken and bare
It used to be someone's home
Now no one lives there.

There's a red barn standing
Held together with nails and dust
And a tired old Massey Harris
All wires and rust

Weeds overgrown in a garden
sown with care
It used to be someone's home
Now no one lives there

And through the crack
In the window pane
I hear the sound
Of the falling rain
Another farm being left run down
Another family moved into town

Had a life that they tried to save
But the banks took it all away
Hung a sign on a torn screen door
Nobody lives here no more

They worked their fingers
To the bone
Nothing left
They can call their own
Packed it in under leaden skies
With just the wheat
Waving them goodbye

Had a life that they tried to save
But the banks took it all away
Hung a sign on a torn screen door
Nobody lives here no more

-- Bob Barnetson