Originally Published as: The View From Above
As we close this edition of Rural Builder, I find myself thinking about time spent in small airplanes with my father when I was a child — lifting off from rural strips, watching patchwork fields slide by below, and realizing early that the built environment looks very different from above. You see planning. You see function. You see whether something was built to last. That perspective still sticks with me and shapes how I read every story in this issue. A good building reveals itself from any altitude — in the layout, the materials, the purpose, and the discipline behind the work.
This month’s lineup is packed with forward motion and field-tested ideas — the kind you can put to work immediately, whether you’re managing crews, planning expansions, or refining how you operate day to day.
We highlight the mikeroweWORKS Work Ethic Scholarship and its role in helping Avery Tauke launch a business straight out of school. It’s more than a success story — it’s a preview of where the skilled trades are headed. Motivated, trained, and ownership-minded builders are entering the field ready to produce results, not just resumes.
We dig into regional building differences that can quietly determine whether a project thrives or struggles — from climate loads to site realities to material performance. We also explore smarter feeding and watering system options that improve chore efficiency, animal health, and long-term maintenance planning. These are the kinds of choices that pay off every single day after the ribbon-cutting.
Our project, which focuses on airplane hangars, looks at wide spans, door systems, wind exposure, and specialty-use demands — one of the most technically interesting and visually striking rural build categories right now. These structures combine engineering precision with practical performance, and they’re becoming more common across private and commercial rural properties.
You’ll also find practical reads on why fire-rated materials carry extra importance in rural environments where response times can be longer, how tidy jobsites directly improve safety, morale, inspection outcomes, and profit, and how stronger branding — with insights from Randy Chaffee — turns reputation into measurable revenue. Operational discipline and brand discipline are closer cousins than many builders realize.
And of course, our Project of the Month continues to showcase the kind of work that sets the bar for the industry — real builds, real solutions, real execution. These features are widely read, widely shared, and often referenced long after publication.
Now here’s the part where I lean in a bit more than usual:
We need your projects!.
If you’re building something you’re proud of — agricultural, commercial, equine, storage, specialty, or hybrid — submit it for Project of the Month. Send the high-resolution photos. Send the materials list. Send the build story and the challenges you solved. Visibility matters. Credibility matters. And your project may be exactly the example another builder needs to see.
The same urgency applies to our upcoming Source Book. If you supply products or services to rural builders, make sure you’re included. This is not a shelf piece — it’s a working reference. Builders circle it, flag it, and rely on it all year. If you’re not in it, you’re harder to find when it counts.
Show us what you’re building. Make sure buyers can find you. And keep raising the standard — from the ground, and from the air.
