NEW CASTLE, Pa. — It’s pouring down rain behind the barn doors at Briar Brook Barn’s Autumn Splendor as the sound of raindrops on the tin roof mixes with the folksy strumming of Jeff Corle’s guitar.
As interested customers roam through vendor booths, Corle belts out “I can get used to not working every day, and I can get used to not needing to bail hay. And I can get used to a job off the farm, but I will never get used to this empty barn.”
For Corle, pursuing music wasn’t so much a challenge as was leaving behind his family’s generations-long dairy farm he desperately loved. Now, as a traveling musician, his latest album speaks of the experiences, lessons learned and heartbreak that came with being a dairy farmer.
Fourth-generation dairy farmer
Corle grew up on a dairy farm outside of Windber, Pennsylvania in Somerset County. Growing up, he played the guitar and wrote songs which led him to pursue songwriting professionally in Nashville, Tennessee after graduating high school.
However, several years later in 2008, Corle felt homesick and moved back to the farm.
“I learned how to write songs in Nashville, but the farm gave me something to write about,” Corle said.
Corle and his father ran the farm together for nearly a decade until his father died in 2018. He inherited the farm and became the fourth-generation dairy farmer in his family.
After taking over operations, Corle decided to start bottling and selling his own milk. In order to do so, he reduced his cows from a herd of 40 to 12.
For two years, operations went well. He was processing, selling and delivering his milk to 14 local stores in his area. However, in 2020 things started to change when costs and inflation skyrocketed.
Alongside high costs, Corle couldn’t compete with big dairy farm prices and was no longer able to finance a full-time employee. In March 2022, he made the tough decision to close down his farm and sell his cows.
“You feel like you’re letting everybody down, your family, your ancestors,” Corle said. “There’s a line in ‘Empty Barn’ that says ‘I wish I didn’t have to be the one.’ That means I wish I didn’t have to be the one to close it down and bring it to an end.”
The heartbreak and pain Corle felt from selling his cows and leaving his dairy farm behind inspired him to pick up his guitar once again and write his most popular song ‘Empty Barn.’
Empty Barn
The night he loaded his cows onto the trailer, Corle couldn’t sleep. He thought about saying goodbye to the cows, thought about the future, thought about the once lively barn that now sat empty just beyond his front door.
As he stirred in his bed, lyrics suddenly started to appear in his head, “I can get used to not working every day.” It started. He tried to push his thoughts away but then another line started to ring in his head, “I can get used to not needing to bail hay.” He tried once again to sleep, but the lyrics kept going, “I can get used to a job off the farm.”
No longer able to avoid what was already on the brink of creation, Corle got out of bed and started writing ‘Empty Barn.’
It took Corle less than two hours the next morning to finish the song from start to finish.
“I almost couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the words,” Corle said. “And I thought to myself, ‘I’m not so much writing this song as I am channeling these emotions, from the ether, from all of those farmers who’ve gone through this in the last 15 to 20 years.’”
After putting ‘Empty Barn’ out online, Corle quickly realized how relatable his song was to so many people. He was then presented with the opportunity in May 2022 to record his songs professionally in Nashville, where he created his latest album, ‘Farm Animal.’
Corle wanted to put together a video for the song, but couldn’t take photos of his own dairy farm anymore. Instead, he took to social media and asked dairy farmers to send in photos of their farms for the video.
“I thought, I’ll use pictures from the past. And then I thought, this song is way more than me and my story now. This song is everybody’s story,” Corle said.
He got pictures from farms all over the country and now the video has over 100,000 views. Like-minded farmers flooded the comment section with stories of their empty barns and thanked Corle for writing a song that resonated so much with their personal experiences.
During his ‘Empty Barn’ performance at the Autumn Splendor, Brenda McKissick was supporting her daughter Lindsay’s business Farm Girl Glitz, one of the vendors featured at Briar Brook Barn.
McKissick and her husband used to have dairy cows on their farm in Harmonsburg, Pennsylvania but had to sell them as her husband got older. She took a video of Corle performing ‘Empty Barn’ live at the Autumn Splendor to send to her husband.
“My husband said the exact same thing in the words that he sang in the song, (that) the worst part of getting rid of the cows was walking into an empty barn,” McKissick said.
Farm Animal
Corle often draws from his life experiences when writing songs, like ‘When I Sell the Farm,’ which is featured on his new album.
‘When I Sell the Farm’ was based on his farming mentor’s story. His mentor went bankrupt in the farming crisis of the late 70s and almost lost his farm. At the last minute, they got a lawyer to save it but had to borrow loads of money to pay off old debts.
Whenever Corle would talk about borrowing money from the Farm Service Agency to his mentor, he could say “Yeah, Farm Service Agency will give you that money. But I’m gonna tell you something boy. They’ll lien everything right down to Grandma’s toothbrush.”
He would continue, saying, “I’d sell every GD thing on this farm, but I’d never sell an inch of land and I’d never sell this farm… and that stuck with me, so the title of the song is ‘When I Sell the Farm.’”
Corle wrote a song titled ‘Mamas’ which is inspired by the farm cats that like to live in his barn.
He recalls a time when he heard a kitten meowing day after day, all hours for food. He would walk out to the barn to give the kitten food, but the kitten would run into the hay, scared, while the older barn cats ate up all the food.
One day when he went to deliver the kitten food, this time he ran toward Corle and jumped up on him. Despite being allergic to cats, Corle took the scrawny kitten into his house to feed him. He promised himself he would eventually let the kitten lose, but a year and a half later he’s still there.
“The moral of that story is that when he was crying and crying and crying, I realized his problem was either his mother abandoned him or something happened to his mother,” Corle said. “And I just thought all creatures need their mother.”
The opening lines start off by saying, “Have you ever heard a kitten bawling, calling for his mama, or seen a newborn calf come runnin’ when mama gets to callin’.”
Corle’s new album titled ‘Farm Animal’ features nine songs talking about his experiences on his dairy farm and the heartbreak felt leaving it behind.
Currently, Corle has only released three songs off the album so far, but plans to release a fourth song soon, and eventually the full album. While he works on releasing his songs, he is traveling the country performing his music live.
For more information on Jeff Corle, find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jeff.corle.90.
(Reporter Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 330-337-3419.)
