Empty Barn, Full Heart – How I Found Healing Through Music After Losing My Dairy Farm

Guest Blog Post by Jeff Corle

My name is Jeff Corle. I am a viral independent music artist with over 70 million streams and views. I’m also a professional keynote concert speaker and a farmer mental health advocate. But up until the spring of 2022 I was simply a full-time, fourth-generation dairy farmer loving my life milking cows on my family farm in the Laurel Mountains of western Pennsylvania. So how did this incredible life transformation of going from cows to country music come about?  Well, let me tell you . . .  

We always milked between 40 and 50 cows on our farm. And as many of you know, that herd size makes it really hard to compete these days and stay in business, when we have a milk price that often times doesn’t even cover the cost of producing the milk.  

For me, the writing had been on the wall for years – I was simply too small to compete and I had no desire or ability to expand any further. So, in that spring of 2022, I made the very difficult and painful decision to shut down the dairy, which meant having to sell my beloved and beautiful Guernsey cows.

When Reality Set In – My Life As a Dairy Farmer Was Over

Now you should know something about me. As many small dairy farmers do, I thought of my cows more as friends and family members, much more so than as mere farm animals, so having to say goodbye to “my girls” was the single hardest thing I ever faced in my life. I thought I was ready for it, but on the day of the sale, I began to experience feelings and emotions I had never experienced before. When the last of the cows, my stubborn little Dolly, was finally loaded onto the trailer and the trailer door slammed shut, reality began to set in. The cows were really leaving and my life as a dairy farmer was over.

As the truck pulled away from the barn that day, the best way I’ve come to describe it is that it felt as though something was literally being ripped out of me. I honestly didn’t know that you could feel so much physical pain from an emotional trauma.

In the days and weeks that followed the sale, I was heartbroken and spiraled down into a deep depression. On a day that I didn’t think I could take the pain any longer, two things leaned against my bedroom wall: a loaded shotgun and my old guitar.

Fortunately for me and my family, I chose the guitar.  Sadly, many farmers faced with similar circumstances are making another choice with farmers now 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general public.

The End of My Dairy Career Wasn’t the End of My Story – It Was the Start of My Song

But, like I said, I had that guitar and I had always messed around with songwriting as a way of expressing myself. So, on that fateful day, I grabbed the guitar and went down to the barn for the first time since the sale of the cows and I stared at the eerily empty space – a space where so much life had been just weeks before and a space where so much of my life had been lived from childhood up.  

In a little while, words and melody began to flow through me and I swear I channeled the song that resulted more so than wrote it. Channeled it from the ether, from all the heartache and pain that farmers have been casting up there in the last several years as we’ve entered into what is now recognized as a full-blown farmer mental health crisis. 

In less that an hour, the song was finished. When I left the barn that day I knew two things: I knew that I felt a hell of a lot better – just getting all that pent-up emotion out was extremely cathartic and therapeutic. I also knew that I had written/channeled a pretty good song. But what I didn’t know is that I had written a song that would soon go on to touch tens of thousands of people all over the world and a song that would forever change my life – “Empty Barn.”

Well, I used to say that writing “Empty Barn” changed my life, but I now realize there was a step that happened long before I ever put pen to paper. And that was that I unknowingly allowed myself to be vulnerable by putting what I was feeling into the words of a song. Then I took that vulnerability one step further by sharing that song with others, which in turn allowed them to lend me their love, support, and encouragement, and that is what really propelled my healing journey forward.  

Talking about Your Mental Health Isn’t Weakness, It’s a Sign of Strength

Now when I do my Keynote Concerts, I like to point out as I tug on my long grey beard that “guys that look like me” are usually not the first ones to raise their hands and say, “Can I tell you how I’m feeling today?” As men, and especially as farmers, we are taught to grin and bear it. We believe in the virtue of self-reliance. We see ourselves as the strong ones for our families and we don’t want to show or admit to perceived weakness. I can testify that those are great virtues and great things to live by in most aspects of life, but they are the absolute worst things to hold on to when it comes to your own mental health.  

There’s a part in my Keynote Concert where I get quiet and lean into the mic and say “Psst, come in here close, guys. I want to tell you a secret. It turns out that if you tell others how you’re feeling, they can help you!  Who knew?” This always gets a big laugh, but it is so freaking true!  Guys need to hear it, understand it, and live it. It’s ok to feel down and it’s more than ok to ask for help. It’s not weakness – it’s strength!

You don’t have to write a song like I did. But you do need to talk to someone: a friend, a co-worker, a family member – dare I say, a counselor or therapist? I promise you, just letting someone know what you’re going through will help you feel a lot better in and of itself.  But talking it through with someone and letting folks know how you feel might just end up changing your life. It sure did mine!