#agricultural barns

[backroad-life]

Credit: Backroad-life

[huariqueje]

Deer Isle Barn - Susan Cohen 

American , b. 1928s

Oil on linen , 16 x 20 in.

[vox-anglosphere]

Few mediaeval barns are left in Britain, but Leigh Court endures..

[arc-hus]

HUYS Centre, Eeklo, Belgium - ZOOM Architecten

[cowboymeemaw]

Barn Cats

Meet Fee, our residential farm lady-

This post is going to go over the importance of barn cats to our farm. Though before I do all that let's get some facts about my barns kitties.

-All my barns cats have free access to outside, the barn, and the house whenever they like. Though they have their own cat room in the barn and prefer that area.

-All barn cats are flea treated, wormed, and spayed/neutered.

-None of my barn cats are feral.

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The Importance Of Barn Cats

When you hear of barn cats, a lot of people think of pets that aren't cared for so they're thrown outside. That is infact wrong! These cats are important to the health and safety of our animals, especially our poultry.

At my land personally we tend to deal with mice issues, horribly. Mice are cute but they carry diseases that can harm our animals. They're very good at chewing into feed bags and contaminating feed, causing money loss and unusable feed.

Mice are sneaky, unfortunately sometimes we don't notice they got into the feed until it's too late. An example of this is they got into the chick feed and their feces caused the death of multiple young chickens. They also like to eat out expensive hog feed, bit the pigs usually eat them back 🤦‍♂️

And to fight back to this issue, we have Barn Cats. These cats are machines, they can successfully kill dozens of mice and prevent them from ruining feed. Ever since getting barn cats there has been a major improvement in the amount of rodents in our barns!

Other animals the cats have successfully delt with are snakes and opossums! We don't have venomous snakes but we do have egg stealers and chick eaters. These cats have successfully made it so we haven't lost anything to a snake in two years!

Now our cats don't get rid of opposums by death. Rather they just deter them from entering the property. Opposums are lovely little creatures but they do attack poultry, and their feces (if consumed by horses) can cause the horse to have a neurological issue and die.

These cats are also incredibly smart! They will kill a mouse or a bird in the feed, but completely ignore a hen and her freshly born chicks! They're able to make a respectful relationship with our livestock! Without them we'd be flushed with rodents and snakes!

[meriol-lehmann]

rang saint-isidore, hébertville

[yz]

A McCormac Farmall Tractor, 1940s.

[wild-raven-and-crow]

An old hay barn built in the 40s, which I painted to look as it did when newly built:

Here is a photo of the barn as it looks now:

Below are other reference photos:

I found a local building with shingles like those the barn originally had, and found a picture of a young cedar fence on the internet I used to imitate the original color of the cedar barn.

I painted this barn as a commission for someone:

Her father built this barn, and now it needs to be torn down. She wanted a picture of it the way she remembered it as a child, so she asked me to reconstruct it in a painting.

The barn was built for cows to feed at, and she explained how it was constructed:

The barn was filled to the roof with loose hay, which would be accessible at the feeding stations under the two side roofs. The walls are sloped so the pressure of the massive hay pile doesn't bow them outward. Her father climbed the ladder next to the long window going up the side of the barn to reach the top of the stack to add more or spread out the hay more evenly.

Media: watercolor on Claybord

[ahedderick]

Recycle

Not to go into too much background detail, quite a few of you already know it, but my family had been cleaning up the Situation at my late father's farm for years, even before he passed away. Our beloved [hmph] county has limited recycling options. In fact, for "chemical waste" there is only ONE DAY every TWO YEARS that you can drop off things you want to get rid of responsibly. Bearing in mind that, in a rural area, just taking a jug of ??whatever?? and dumping it somewhere is 1) wrong but 2) absolutely guaranteed to go unnoticed and unpunished.

We don't want to do that! We want it properly and safely recycled. But what we have, after investigating all eleven buildings on the farm where junk was stashed, is an enormous quantity of jugs, containers, buckets, and decomposing paper bags of. stuff. Old agricultural stuff, mainly, but also machinist/metal-working stuff. Most of it unlabeled, or with labels too old and worn to be read. The large glass jug of concentrated sulfuric acid was an anomaly in that it was clearly labeled in in a proper container (glass wine jug, but hey, glass is glass)

We had quite a lot of this already gathered up in October of 2019 (ha! The good old days! so quaint!). However, that October we were also planning and preparing to be a temporary wedding venue; my brother and SIL were getting married the next weekend and that had to be a priority over recycling.

October 2021 rolled around, but my husband and I were both a little distracted and, honestly, we just forgot about it. There's almost NO advertisement of this event, by the way. We were aggravated, but there was nothing to do but stockpile all that damned chemical waste for another two years.

Yesterday my husband very c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y loaded the bed of his pickup truck with all this . . . mess. Buckets, bottles, plastic, glass, cardboard, bags. It FILLED the 8-foot bed of the pickup. And this morning, early, he very c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y drove off to the county fairgrounds, to turn it all in. It will be quite a large relief to all of us to have this done with.

Damn, Dad. How DID you make SUCH a mess of this farm. How?!!!

[These are old pix from January 2021]

[eopederson2]

Farm, Douglas County, Washington, 2019.

[fawnvoice]

Look at That Smoke! by Mom Helen Via Flickr: This was the hottest the fire was---we had to move back, almost out to the road. A carload of nuns were out for a drive and stopped by to watch the barn burn. It was amazing how fast it burnt.

[backroad-life]

Credit: Chris Bair

[uniqueartisanconnoisseur]

Roadside Attractions in Northwest Iowa!

My husband Keith and I headed to northwestern Iowa. We attended the 2024 Red Power Round Up, an International Harvester event held in Spencer, Iowa. We found lots of roadside attractions during our travels. Hosted by Iowa Chapter 5 of the IHCC group, the location was the Clay County Fairgrounds. This beautiful show was well planned. Then the rains came and ended the event early. Floods caused…

[coffeenuts]

[whistledog]

Hotdog ass cat

[meriol-lehmann]

tracteur, rang saint-isidore, hébertville