Plans for barnyards

Abstract

Introduction: We need only to take a short drive through the country to see our present system of making barn yards. Everywhere the tendency is to crowd everything into as small a space as possible, too often using the fence corner as a machinery shed, or the machinery is cast in some out of the way place where it lies until time to use it again. Not only is room lacking to store machinery but many animals are left out to seek shelter on the leeward side of a tumbling down barb wire fence. Feed, which was gotten after months of toil, expenditure of time and money, and the wearing out of costly machinery, in many cases is left out in the open to receive all the rain and the sunshine until the forage is unfit for consumption by animals. I have one yard in mind, and this is not the only one I am sorry to say, which is one of the dirtiest yards when it comes a "wet spell". You wade around shoe top deep, in a slushy, soft, sort of a chocolate colored mass surrounding the barn for several yards as a result of throwing manure out of openings back of the horses, made for the purpose, or out of the nearest opening that is handy. Many farmers do not seem to have any taste for beauty or cleanliness. They have the front yard full of obnoxious weeds, brush strewn everywhere, post stubs lying around, worn and unworn out machinery to mar what might otherwise be a most beautiful view. In like manner I might go on and on telling of the faulty systems now in use, but it is not necessary, they are too conspicuous. The idea of this paper is not to take up each fault of the present system and tell how it should be overcome (which likely cannot be done) but to give a suggestion or two which may tend to overcome some of the difficulties which must be met in the close competition we now have. When the trend of the times is the "almighty dollar" it is time we were stopping up the leaks of the pennies and dimes and do more economical and less shiftless farming.