When you’re moving into a house, there are some items you consider a “must – have” such as a li...
When you’re moving into a house, there are some items you consider a “must – have” such as a light bulb, serving dishes, and cooking utensils. Similarly, when building your farm or barn house, there are 5 items which your farm house should have:
1. Harvesting Tools
If you have a small backyard garden, you can manually harvest your fruits and vegetables when you need them. However, as your farm gets bigger, using your hands to uproot plants could get tiresome and employing labor may be out of your budget. This is why harvesting tools are a must-have.
Harvesting equipment such as hand sickles, ploughs, and harrows come in handy to save time and labor costs as well promote efficiency of harvesting. They can also serve as an extra source of income when you lease them to other farmers.
2. Cultivating Tools
If your farm is entirely a livestock farm such as a poultry or cattle rearing farm, then you might be able to get by without cultivating tools. Even at that though, it doesn’t hurt to have these tools in case you ever feel the urge to do a little gardening.
However, if you are growing crops, then tools such as spades, shovels, rakes, and hoes are essential for easy soil penetration or to transfer soil from one place to another.
3. Irrigation System and Tools
If you don’t have a constant supply of water on your farm, your crops might not grow well especially during the dry season. This is why your farm house must make space for a functional irrigation system.
A proper irrigation system provides plants with the necessary amount of water needed for sufficient growth. It improves the water conditions in the soil and increases the water content of plants.
Some irrigation systems could be as simple as a watering can, as complicated as a multi-level drip-irrigation system, or as tech-driven as drones.
4. Toolshed
Just like you need a kitchen cabinet, you need a tool shed to store your tools. This will help you organize your tools and keep track of them.
Having a tool shed also prevents accidents. Imagine your spade just lying around in the farm and you’re walking around at night. A mishap could occur. Having a toolshed creates a designated space for your tools and reduces your chances of farm accidents.
5. Crop/Livestock Feeding Equipment
Whether you’re growing crops, rearing animals, or doing both, your barn needs a feeding equipment. Animal feeding equipment such as hay racks, feeder, and feed buckets are essential for supplying animals with foods while watering systems and bowls are necessary for supplying livestock with clean water.
Although plants make their food through photosynthesis, they still need certain nutrients from the soil to survive. To ensure proper application of those nutrients, equipment such as sprayers are a must-have for your farm house.
What’s in your barn house that was left off this list? Let us know below.
Vegetables have become such a huge part of our daily meals that we cannot have some of our meals without them. Here are three fun facts about vegetables that you probably didn’t know about:
1. Tomato Is Botanically A Fruit But Legally A Vegetable:
By definition, a fruit is a seed-bearing structure that develops from the ovary of a flowering plant while vegetables are other plant parts such as roots, leaves, and stems. Based on this, a lot of what we consider vegetables (such as cucumber, avocado, eggplant, okra, and even pepper) are actually fruits. However, even though tomatoes fit into the definition of a fruit, legally, tomatoes are vegetables.
In the late 1800s, the Congress passed a tariff act that imposed a 10% tax on whole vegetables. Vegetable merchants used to bring in tomatoes and not pay the tariff, on the basis that tomatoes were fruits. They took the case to court and in the end, the Supreme Court ruled tomato as a vegetable in 1893. They made this decision based on the culinary application of the food.
Many people backed this argument because despite being a fruit, we eat tomatoes like vegetables.
2. Eating Too Many Carrots Can Turn Your Skin Orange:
This seems like something you would tell a kid who was eating too many carrots so they’d stop but it is actually a fact. Eating too many carrots can turn your skin orange and here’s why.
Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, a natural pigment which is responsible for the vegetable’s orange color. When you eat too many carrots (or pumpkins or any other food high in carotene), the excess beta-carotene will enter your bloodstream and be stored under your skin. This will cause your skin to have a yellow or orange sort of tint. Medically, this condition is known as carotenemia.
Now for the question of how many carrots is too many? Well, that differs based on individuals but the average healthy dosage of beta-carotene is 6 – 8 milligrams. Therefore continuously going above that limit for a long period can be too many carrots.
3. Tomatoes Win The Popularity Contest:
If I asked you to name the most popular vegetable, you’d probably think of onions or other vegetables you use in your everyday meal. However, tomatoes actually take the prize.
Be it a fruit or a vegetable, tomatoes are actually the most consumed food in the world. About 177 million metric tons of tomatoes are produced yearly in the world. The three largest producers of the food are China, India, and the United States.
Tomatoes are so popular that there is an entire festival around them called “La Tomatina.” The festival is held every last Wednesday of August in a town called Buñol ( in Valencia). It involves the participants throwing tomatoes at each other and getting into tomato fights, all for entertainment purposes.
ORIGINAL SOURCE: FARM CROWDY
Some people limit agriculture business to crop cultivation and animal rearing but there is more to agriculture than that. There are so many agricultural business opportunities that you can explore. For instance, in farming alone, the small farm business ideas are endless. Outside farming, you can start a rental business, a juice business, or even invest in agri business.
2. Check For Available Market
As stated earlier, agriculture is quite broad. However, this doesn’t mean that every area has a market large enough to sustain a business. Before you venture into any agri- business, it is necessary to research the available market and examine its potential of scale as well as feasibility. For instance, venturing into a business with year – round demand such as rice may have a larger market than someone who sells Christmas trees. This doesn’t mean that you should completely shy away from businesses with a small market, but when starting out, let there be enough demand to sustain your business.
It is one thing to know you have a market, but an entirely different thing to identify and reach out to them, especially in the midst of competition. This is why it is necessary to research your target market so you can come up with a marketing plan on how best to get your product across to them. It is important to have a solid marketing plan before your product or service is ready to be sold.
4. Analyze Potential Risks
Every business has its risk and as you may have heard before, “no risk, no reward.” In agriculture business, there is always the possibility of environmental and natural hazards. For instance, if you are rearing chickens, you could have a high mortality rate or rodent infestation. Therefore when starting a business in agriculture, you need to properly analyse potential risks and come up with a risk mitigation plan.
The purpose of this info-graphic is to open our eyes to the imperative details about forests and their benefits to the society. Hopefully this will encourage you to help preserve forests by adopting a climate-friendly lifestyle.
Forestry: An Undeniable Importance
The importance of forests cannot be understated. Humanity relies heavily on forests and forestry in itself for its essential continuation. Forestry is so important that it influences things such as the oxygen that we breathe in and the wood we use to carve out furniture. Aside from administering territories for animals and livelihoods for humans, forests prevent soil depletion and moderate climate change. However, despite our dependence on forests, we are still enabling them to disappear by not caring enough for them.
Here is a brief synopsis of how forestry affected your life today:
Did you have your breakfast today? Commute to work in a minibus or automobile recently? Sat on a chair? Created and executed a shopping list? Have you used tissue paper this month? These are just some of the things you couldn’t have done without the output from our forests. Forest outputs are an indispensable part of our daily lives, and they influence our world in more ways than we can imagine.
The Bottom-line about Forestry
