EUDORA, Kan. — The sight is a familiar one along the dusty back roads of the Great Plains: an old roofless silo left to the elements along with decaying barns, chicken coops and stone homesteads.


This is the landscape of rural abandonment that defines a region that has struggled with generations of exodus.


But increasingly there are unexpected signs of rebirth. Many of these decrepit silos, once used to store feed for livestock, now just hollow columns of cinder blocks, have through happenstance transformed into unlikely nurseries for trees.


The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas.


Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles.


“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.”


This was never easy country for trees. The early settlers encountered so few on the plains that they served as memorable landmarks. Those planted since have been twisted by the relentless winds. Still, cottonwoods, hackberries and bur oaks managed to root themselves to the landscape.


The human footprint, however, continues to erode. At farms like the one run by Joshua Svaty, a former Kansas agriculture secretary, there are too many empty buildings to count, including an old barn occupied by a group of roosting vultures.


“Our farm is a vibrant operation,” he said. “But if someone visited, they might think it was abandoned because so many of our buildings are in a state of decay.”


This is because rural life has been reshaped by the new realities of industrial agriculture. Farms are larger and employ fewer people, so many homes stand empty. Tractors and other equipment have grown too big for old-time barns, which fall victims to disuse.


In an era of specialization, those growing wheat and corn are less likely to raise cows and chickens on the side, so livestock buildings — including the silos — are left to gather dust.


There has been a growing movement by preservationists to protect this disappearing architecture. But in places where practicality is a guiding principle, there is often little sentimentality for wood and stone, even if it was cobbled together by some industrious ancestor.


And because it can be more expensive to tear these down than to leave the task to time, they are left to teeter.


For Jason Thoren, who lives here along a gravel road on what was his great-great-grandfather’s farm, most of the barns, sheds and other structures on the property have been reduced to something akin to lawn ornaments.


Mr. Thoren remembers milking the cows and shoveling hay for the horses as a child. But like so many who grew up in rural areas, he now leads what is unmistakably a suburban life; he commutes each day to his job coaching football at a nearby private university.


Standing in a sharp spring wind to study the rundown silo towering over the property, Mr. Thoren remarked that he used to play inside as a child. There was a tree growing in the still air, probably not much taller than he is now. He always regarded it as a magical presence, he said.


And on this day, he marveled that the tree had finally emerged from the top of its concrete incubator to stretch its branches above the derelict family farm.