At The Farm Gate
By Joanie Stiers
July 2008

How weddings can become a business expense

Shopping for my wedding supplies was spent equally between the Michaels craft store and Menards. We needed silver ribbon, and we needed roofing screws the craft store didn’t carry.
No wedding manual from the bookstore could help us prepare for my wedding reception on the farm seven years ago. My parents should publish a wedding guide subtitled “How to Make Your Daughter’s Wedding a Business Expense.” A second edition could focus on my brother’s farm reception, and my aunt and uncle could co-author a third after their daughter’s farm reception this summer.
My husband and I would choose the same reception venue today, even knowing the days of sweat-dripping labor and occasional midnight stress the preparation created. We married our love for one another and the farm. The celebration also aesthetically improved the farm the way Mom wanted and gave Dad the concrete shop floor he asked for every Christmas. (Concrete is considered a luxury on the farm. In fact, my family will designate a job for even the smallest slab.)
Having a farm wedding reception is like preparing your home for a high school graduation party. It’s just that your home also is a business with a half dozen hog buildings, a machine shed, four-acre yard, grain bins and an old, 40-foot-tall barn.
The farm makeover for my wedding began immediately after planting corn and soybeans one spring. We stood on the powder dirt floor of the machine shed, cleared of tractors and the manure spreader. This would be the dining hall and dance floor for my wedding reception by fall harvest. Corn matures in 111 days.
We brushed and sprayed paint by the five-gallon bucketfuls on every outbuilding. The men tightrope-walked the barn’s roof supports to add metal sheeting. Mom designed the landscape by day. By night she learned methods to reduce the fly population associated with livestock production.
The grandmas provided energy in the form of ground bologna sandwiches and casseroles. Relatives, friends and soon-to-be in-laws transformed the machine shed into a reception hall that included a new floor, ceiling and interior walls. We plugged white lights into outlets as my dad wired them two days before the wedding. The result was a farmshed-turned-reception-hall that impressed even the DJ who worried for his sensitive electronics when booking the job.
Guests still talk about their experience. We feasted on farm-raised pork and snapped wedding portraits with a cornfield backdrop. Two combines parked facing an outdoor sign that read, “Just Combined.” My brother added similar touches, but chose a tent on the hill, which allowed the tractors and tools that accumulated over six years to stay in the remodeled machine shed.
My mom mentioned adding a sign to the entry of my brother’s reception that read “All because two people fell in love.” We should have finger printed that into Dad’s concrete shop floor.